


Midnight Dreaming

by wordwhisper



Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, field hospitals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:00:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29318277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordwhisper/pseuds/wordwhisper
Summary: in which that bullet in Normandy wasn't quite just a ricochet and Nix's one of Doc Roe's colleagues with the division.
Relationships: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	Midnight Dreaming

**Author's Note:**

> so yeah this is basically me showing up 20 years late to the party (literally) with a fic but this wouldn't leave me alone so here it is i guess? Dedicated to Damian Lewis's face and my PhD thesis which gave me the excuse to read through an enitre bookshelf's worth of WWII history of which some details are included here. There were also ridiculous amounts of "Jetlag" by Simple Plan in the French version with Marie Mai consumed during the making of this fic. I'm not quite sure if that made it better or not. 
> 
> Other than that, as always, this is based soely on the TV series and doesn't mean to depict any real-life persons or events.

“The house on the other side of the square, third floor.”

The young soldier presses against the wall beside Dick, chest heaving.

His face is smeared with dirt, a bit of blood sticking to the edge of his jaw and eyes almost unnaturally bright in contrast with the grime around them.

“I’m guessing two, maybe three.”

“Has anyone tried to get to them?”

  
“There’s a panzer almost right in the middle of the route to them. It’d be suicidal.”

Dick doesn’t recognize him, which means he must be from another company, transferred to them as a replacement at some point in the last two days, probably, when they lost a lot of men in the last attack. It’s all started to blur at some point into shreds of mad, loud, fire-breathing figments of hell somewhere between dream and reality. All apart from their eyes, that same look of wide-eyed awe and disbelief. He’s seen it on some just before they were taken away to the field hospital tents, like they were surprised by it, hadn’t expected of it to be actually possible to die in this war.

He can’t be more than eighteen.

“Alright. Stay here.”

There’s another burst of machine gun fire somewhere in the alley to their left, followed by shouts in German.

“Sir –”

“Stay here.”, Dick repeats firmly, and the boy finally gives a quick nod.

His fingers tighten around his gun.

He motions to the rest of the group perched behind an army vehicle on the other side of the road to come over and join them. A few are crouched on the ground, reloading their guns, one has his gun trained on the road ahead, a cigarette dangling in the corner of his mouth. Most of them have been here since the beginning and weren’t particularly pleased at having to share this attack with newcomers who, from their perspective, were only going to get them killed with their inexperience.

“Are we moving out, sir?”, the first one over asks, stubbing out his cigarette beneath his foot.

The others follow quickly, weapons shouldered.

“You are. We’re going over to the square on the end of the street and move to join to others.”, he says as soon as the last one’s gathered around him.

“Once we’re on the other side of the square you’ll move in from the back, I saw an opening in a backyard on the way in that should take you through. Platoon 6 will close in from the river.”

He shots at a look at the new boy and the other ten guys leaning against the wall behind him who’d been watching them.

“Clear?” 

The boy nods again.

After a few moments, the others do, too, jerking their chins in quiet acknowledgment.

“If something should happen and the Germans give stronger fire than we suspected on the square, gather whoever you can find and move them in the same way.”

“Yes sir.”

“What about 4?”, one of the soldier in the back chimes in.

“We can’t be sure they made it. We’ll have to make do.”

Nobody says anything else, but Dick can see their fear. He doesn’t think he’s ever really not seen it since they got here, in their posture, their eyes, even the way they sleep so lightly that the light tap of a sole against the earth wakes them. It’s so omnipresent it’s got nuances.

“It’ll work”, he says, “I wouldn’t let you go if I thought it was impossible.”

“Winters!”  
With one last look, he pushes himself to his feet and sets out down the road.

Speirs meets him halfway, panting a well and his gun held loosely in his hands. His uniform is covered in black oil and blood beneath the elbow, one of the arms ripped.

“As far as I can tell that yard is free of Germans, so yeah, it might just work.”

“Four?”

“Still no sign.”

“Six?”

“Started moving five minutes ago. We’re still on track.”

They’ve come up on the crossroads at the end of the street, Speirs pressed against the wall just behind the corner of the building, gun aimed at the square in front of them, and Dick right behind him.

“It’s quiet.”

“It’s always quiet in the beginning.”

  
In front of them the road opens up into a little square with an old café and run-down, little buildings with peeling paint, some of them with only one or two walls still standing. Birds’ nests perch on top of the ruins, the windows are broken and the rusty sign above the shop is faded to the point of being barely legible anymore, hanging crookedly on a single metal thread. A few meters on the left two German army vans stand perfectly side by side like they’re orderly parked along a city boulevard somewhere, but completely burned out, one turned onto its roof. Behind them, in the middle of the square, the medieval church of the town rises above the other buildings, a dark expanse of finely carved stone framed by a few trees on its side. It’s not big, objectively, but the surrounding village is so tiny that it looks ridiculously pompous.

A little girl’s doll lies on the pavement close to them, the polka-dot dress dirty from the rain and blonde hair streaked with dust. Pieces of its porcelain face lay around it in the mud.

There’s no sign of any activity anywhere, a strange, vibrating, all-consuming silence, the kind that makes his hair stand out on the back of his neck because it never stays like that.

Speirs lets his eyes slide over the tower of the church, the collapsed house on the side.

“Yeah, but they're here aren't they? They must be.”

Then, as if in answer to that, everything explodes.

Machine-gun fire erupts from the direction they’d come, long and sustained.

Twenty seconds. Then another, closer to them on the opposite side of the square.

Shouts. A single, sharp cry.

Dick goes to move forward, but Speirs holds him back with a single, pointed hand on his chest, shaking his head when he looks at him. A few moments later two german panzer break onto the square from behind a building near the church that had looked absolutely abandoned, crushing the little trees at its side like matches. From the others side he hears a few german shouts. They must have seen them, too.

“We’ll have to move back and join up with them on the other side. They’re heading for the passage.”

  
“I’ll brief six.”

Speirs doesn’t move for a second, then he nods curtly and his hand drops from Dick's chest.

Dick slips past him onto the square, keeping close to the buildings for cover even though it’s probably pretty useless here. There’s too much open space, too many possible places for them to hide. His only real chance is to do it quickly enough to win those few seconds of surprise it’s going to take him to cross into something approaching actual cover closer to the other side.

The sky is still quiet, too, the clouds too low for the proper fighter-plane support they’d been hoping for. Although he’s been watching it for most of time he’s been talking to Speirs he almost slips on the doll, stepping to the left in the last moment and knocking his arm against a wall.

He sees the flash of the barrel in the sunlight a moment before it actually happens, the dark smudge of a German soldier’s cap half-tucked behind a wall beside an abandoned almost directly in front of him, then there’s a sudden explosion of pain just above his hip so intense that it takes his breath away. There’s a sort of static noise in his ears and the sounds on the street around him dull, like they’re coming through cotton. He can hear his own breath, ragged and irregular. His feet keep moving for a few more steps in the direction he’d been walking in, strangely detached and then, like a chicken’s body with its head cut off, everything catches up and he sinks to his knees. The force of it sends another jolt of pain through his body. He tries to keep upright, but it’s like every string has been cut. His hands on which he’d been trying to support himself slip in the mud and he lands on his injured side and this time the pain almost makes him black out. He gasps hoarsely, trying to roll onto his back, anywhere else.

The sky slides into view above him, a pale blue with a few grey clouds drifting across. A swarm of black birds crosses from left to right, shrieking. Guns drone to the west.

He’d always thought was merciful, as merciful as anything can be in this hell, how quick everything goes in many cases. The way soldiers just stilled in the middle of a movement, stayed draped in their poses over rooftops or the filled sandbags of the barriers like they’d stand up any moment. Sometimes, the sniper shots are so precise there’s very little blood.

You don't get to say goodbye, but you don't get to feel sorry about it, either. And most of them had already said goodbye in one way or another the moment they left the harbour in New York.

He’s been waiting for it so long it’s almost a relief.

Another salve of shots goes off on his right, muffled, too, incredibly distant. He moves his head to one side, his fingers flexing beside him, a broken down house coming into view, the burned out cars, then two Germans in black uniforms. They’re moving between the bodies, obviously looking for weapons or something else they can use and he can feel his breathing pick up immediately and unhelpfully. His pulse races, both with the effort of pumping blood that’s not there and the sudden rush of adrenaline. Too fast.

Suddenly, one of the Germans, in the black uniform of the SS, draws his gun and shots one of the men sprawled on the ground, one, practiced motion, directly in the back of the head. He closes his eyes, tries to focus on calming his breathing. There’s no way he’ll be able to fight them so, rationally, there’s no way out of this. Unless they don’t know he’s alive and so far they don’t, he realizes. He must be covered in blood, hasn’t moved for a while since he’s been hit and all the others around him are very obviously dead, so there’s no immediate reason for them to assume he’s anything other than dead, too. They’d probably already moved over if they actually thought he was still alive, to check if he still posed any danger if nothing else.

It‘s basic battlefield rationale. He closes his eyes, which would logically be the first thing that would give him away within seconds as soon as they looked a little closer, tries to relax his hands at his sides. His back screams with the urge to move now that he can’t, the wound at his side pulsing hotly.

“ _Der hier sieht wichtig aus._ ”

„ _Ja, ich habe ihn auch schon gesehen._ _Offizier?_ ”

The first guy laughs, the sound so exaggerated and inappropriately bright in the middle of all this that it sends shivers down his spine. Dick can’t remember the last time he heard one actually meant what it sounded like.

“ _Lass uns nachschauen. Sicher kein einfacher Soldat._ ”

Their footsteps come closer, the distinctive, pointed thud of heavy army-issue boots.

The rest of the square is almost completely quiet now, wind rustling in the leaves of a tree somewhere nearby. From a street to his right comes the distant rattle of cars passing on a bad road.

“ _Ich denke wir hatten Recht._ ”

The steps stop abruptly, the voices almost directly above him now.

“ _Schau dir die Orden an._ ”

Although he’s tried to brace himself for it, the touch of a hand to his side is still a shock, rough, impatient. _The weapons._ They brush over the wound and it takes every control he has not to flinch, jerk away from the pain. Somehow he manages not to make a noise, but for a few seconds he’s sure they must have heard him breathe, see the rise of his chest.

“ _Ja, ich sehe sie. Wichtig genug._ ”

They all inevitably picked up a bit of German during their time in Europe, some more, some less, but he doesn’t need to know the language to understand the smile behind the words. The hand moves further down his leg, feeling roughly for anything valuable there.

A hand pushes his shirt jacket aside with the minimum amount of touch required as tough it’s something contagious, then fingers brush the edge of his shirt aside and he feels them dip down to trace the line of his dog-tags for a moment. They’re not particularly valuable in themselves, but it’s not uncommon for men to take them and collect them like some kind of strange trophy the same way some tribes collect their enemies’ heads. He’s seen them do it more than once and it’s probably not even the most outlandish thing the war bred.

After a while, he moves his hand away and searches Dick’s breast pocket.

The other has apparently joined him, patting down Dick’s arm and chest before he abruptly stops at his wings. Dick can feel him drag the pad of his finger over it, almost reverently. He keeps the air in his lungs, holding it against the burn in his chest, because if he breathed now there’s no way the German won’t feel the movement of it beneath his hand. The German takes his time, tracing the shape a second time.

“ _Schön, oder?_ ”

“ _Noch ein Paar?_ ”

Both of them laugh again, the guy’s hand still on Dick’s chest. His heartrate has picked up dangerously, his body struggling against the overwhelming urge to just open his mouth and take in as much air as he can. He feels tears prickle behind his closed eyes.

“ _Nimm sie und lass uns gehen_.”

A quick jerk, then the guy’s hand moves down to his belt, pulling open the pouch hanging there. The second hand is gone and the guy must have stood up, his footsteps crouching against what sounds like fine shards of glass somewhere close as he begins to move away.

The pouch drops back onto his body and he feels the guy stand up as well, then stop briefly, probably to pick up the rifle next to him. Slowly, carefully, Dick lets the air flow through his nose, sucks in a new lungful until his breaths have found a normal rhythm again, still flat enough not to move his chest too much. He keeps his eyes closed.

In the distance, the shots have stopped as well, and it’s disturbingly quiet, not even the birds singing anymore.. His fingers brush against the ground and he feels them move through something wet.

Only very distantly he understands that it’s his own blood.

****

He wakes up gasping.

The pain floods back immediately, so sharply and overwhelmingly that it’s hard to breathe for a few seconds. His side feels like it’s ripped to shreds, burning hot. His throat is completely dry and he feels feverish like he’s been lying in the sun too long. He tries to make a noise, but all that comes out is a weak, pitiful croak and even that is painful. His breath rattles in his chest, too quick.

“It’s alright, we’ll get this fixed.”

A face swims in and out of focus at his side, dark hair and dark eyes.

He’s wearing the black uniform of an SS-officer as well, a little too wide around his shoulders with a few silver decorations on the lapel. The words of the german soldiers flash through his mind, unbidden. _Der hier sieht wichtig aus._ Dick feels his pulse pick up in anticipation, lungs expanding harshly, and it feels like dabbing at a wound that’s not quite healed, ribs sore as though he’s been kicked repeatedly. He focuses on his hand, tries to slowly move his fingers down the side of his leg to the pocket just above his knee, the small knife he’d tucked there a few weeks ago.

“Yeah, they took that, too.”, the guy says without even looking at Dick. “The one in your jacket as well.”

He’s working open the buttons of Dick’s jacket, quickly, mechanically, before he brushes it off his stomach and just rips the shirt beneath. The dried blood has made the fabric stick to his wound and Dick gasps at the sudden, additional pain as it’s jerked away, then again when the man presses a damp piece of cloth against it with the same detached efficiency. There’s still absolutely no way he’s going to be able to fight him like that.

“I know it’s not particularly convincing, but I’m not one of them. Save your strength, you’re going to need it.”

“And you’re expecting me to just believe that?”

He closes his eyes and grinds his teeth together, hard, as the guy wipes the cloth over the wound. His fingers are covered in blood when he pulls them away, the cloth soaked. He lets it drop and moves one hand towards the bag hanging at his side. His brows are drawn together in concentration but the rest of his expression is carefully guarded, no hint of how good or bad it looks.

“Which one was yours?”, the guy asks, ignoring his question.

“What?”

“Which company was yours?”

A sharp pain flares in his side for a few seconds, strong enough to make him gasp, then slowly mellows out into a kind of dull warmth and that sensation spreads as well, leaving his entire side more or less numb. A needle. Morphine.

He’s trying to distract me, Dick realizes.

The thought makes him irrationally angry, somehow, like he’s being treated like a child.

“Easy.”

The guy lets the vial drop on the ground, then turns to his bag again. 

“Where are they?”, Dick asks after a few moments, watching him pull out a few bandages.

When he doesn’t say anything for a few moments he repeats it, a little firmer. The anger flares again - _like a child_ \- but it’s more subdued now, too. Even breathing feels like moving rocks piled on his chest, unnaturally heavy.

“Where are they?”

“They’ve all retreated behind the town limit to regroup.”

He presses a few of the badges to Dick’s side, hard enough to make him grit his teeth.

“I’ve stayed behind to tend to the wounded, which is also why I took that jacket. Even the SS tend not to shot their own.”, he says eventually.

“Where did you get it?”

“An SS-officer in a back-street who definitely won’t need it.”

Dick watches him fumble for something in a pocket of his trousers.

It’s his eyes, he thinks, completely out of nowhere, they’re too warm, too full of barely subdued laughter to actually be those of an SS-officer, and even though he’s vaguely aware that it’s a totally irrational argument it seems irresistibly logical at the time - that the world is easy enough to be able to tell a Nazi from a non-Nazi by his eyes alone.

The guy lets his bag drop and casts a gaze over the street behind them.

“We need to get you out of here. Quickly.”

“That bad, huh?”

He doesn’t answer, eyes fixed on whatever he’s seen in that street, and makes a sign with his hand, motioning to someone just outside Dick’s field of view. Above, another swarm of birds passes over the sky, a dirty white this time. Their motion seems strangely slow, like they’re moving through syrup and their dots blur into each other in front of his eyes, pulsing like stars. A few moments later there are footsteps approaching them in a light jog, the low murmur of conversation.

“Can you take him?”, Dick hears the guy ask. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Yeah, grab the legs.”

Out of the corner of his eye he sees him shrug off the jacket, throwing it somewhere on the ground beside them, and Dick catches a glimpse of the ‘L.Nixon’ on his name-tag before two hands slide beneath his armpits and jerk him off the ground and onto a stretcher. His eyes drift shut and he hears himself moan, his side throbbing. It feels wet, as though it’s started bleeding again.

A motor rattles somewhere nearby, going very slowly, while they take the stretcher up and start walking towards it disturbingly rapidly. Dick suddenly has the overwhelming urge to sit up and see his wound, what they’re seeing, make sure that he’s not missing an arm or leg or something else important, but as soon as he tries he’s pushed back. The backdoor of the van is pulled open and with another, jerky movement he’s pushed inside, the grey sky changing to a dark, painted metal ceiling. He moves his head for a last glimpse of the sun and sees the guy push himself up and slide in as the last of the medical team, then pull the door closed.

The last thing he sees is the handprint of fresh blood his grip leaves on the glass.

****

“Hey, welcome back.”

Dick hears him before he sees him, the scrape of the chair as he pushes it back, the rustle of his clothes. A high ceiling stretches above him, half of it collapsed and opening up to a darkening evening sky where the first stars are just starting to appear. The light from the torches fixed near the top flickers over marble figures and sharp stone ornaments.

The smell of torched meat and disinfectant is so pungent that he has to fight the weave of nausea for a few moments. His mind immediately starts evaluating the situation with the cool detachedness of a colonel inspecting his troops before battle: Pain in the side still there, worse than before, which means they’ve already removed the bullet.

Bandaged. No damp feeling around it so probably the bleeding has finally stopped. 

Judging from the sky it’s close to nine, which means he was unconscious for least seven hours.

He’s not hungry, but incredibly thirsty, probably because of the amount of blood he’s lost.

Hot, high fever but not dangerous yet.

His skin feels uncomfortably clammy, damp with cold sweat.

“You were lucky, you know.”

He feels Nixon gently loosen the bandage, then slowly pull it away from the wound. It’s stuck there with blood and Dick gaps when it comes off with a surprisingly hard jerk.

“It didn’t penetrate too deeply and missed practically every vital organ, even the nurse says she’s never seen anything like it before.”

He tries to look down and sees nothing but raw, red flesh for a moment, blackened in some places like it’s been burned and thicker around the edges where it dips down into the hole the bullet left. He’s not wearing his own shirt anymore but a simple, white one that’s cut off around the edges.

He turns his eyes back towards the ceiling, closing his eyes as the nausea rises again just from that movement.

“Yeah”, he says eventually, “I guess.”

“Sleep.”

His first instinct is to say no, he can’t, there’s no way he can just lie here and wait, but he actually does feel tired and he can already feel it dragging him under again. He briefly wonders if he’s given him another dose of morphine.

He has the vague feeling that there’s something incredibly important he has to ask before he gives into it and he opens his eyes to do it, but Nixon just smiles.

“Sleep.”, he repeats.

****

It’s completely dark the next time he wakes up.

The bright light of an almost full moon comes through the hole in the ceiling, tipping the stone edges in silver. Somewhere further down the line a soldier is sobbing in his sleep.

Everything still feels too hot, his entire body prickling with it and throat burning and the wound is throbbing steadily.

He makes a low sound, closing his eyes again because even the moonlight feels like too much at the moment. There’s the sound of water sloshing close by and for a few moments he can make absolutely no sense of it until he feels a damp towel being gently run over his forehead.

“Sleep. It’s still night.”

****

A lamp’s been turned on at the side of the bed and he sees Nixon perched on a rickety wooden chair beside it, reading an old, worn book with a beautiful leather cover that’s barely holding together anymore. The pages are slightly yellowed, curled with use.

“Have you been here this whole time?”

Nixon looks up, momentarily startled as though he’s only just realized where he is, then he smirks and settles back more comfortably into the chair.

“How do you feel about Dostojewski?”, he asks instead of answering.

He reads to Dick in a low voice, the light flickering on his face, until Dick’s asleep again.

****

There’s a wheat field, the sun barely rising over the horizon. It’s completely burned down after an attack, still smouldering in some places.

The sound of weaves crashing on the shore drifts over from somewhere although it doesn’t really make any sense for it to be here. Woods rise up on a hill, fading into the distance.

An SS-officer is walking up and down the line of soldiers in front of him, their hands tied behind their backs. Two others are loading their guns behind a truck nearby, throwing occasional gazes at the group and Dick wants to tell warn them, tell them to run, but nothing comes out. He has absolutely no voice.

They shot the first five, one by one, then the SS officer draws his gun and finishes off the rest – ten, fifteen, thirty more. When he’s finished, he turns around and Dick is suddenly staring into his own face, cap tucked down deeply over his forehead. He just looks at himself with a kind of cool irritation and disgust, like he’s a cockroach he’s just seen running over his boot.

Dick looks to the side just as the SS-officer, just as _he_ , points his gun at himself and he sees that the men lying there are his men from Easy Company. Weirdly, there’s no blood, but they’re pale and absolutely quiet.

Then the SS-officer with his face pulls the trigger.

****

The second time the SS-officer has Nixon’s face when he turns around.

“You should have come earlier.”, he says calmly. “I told you there was no one where you were looking.”

He steps forward, finger on the trigger.

“They were waiting for you, you know. The whole time.”

It’s somehow worse than the shot itself.

**** 

The third time, he’s in the sea, the sky raining fire.

It’s incredibly cold and the weight of his wet clothes is tugging him down, the weaves lapping at his face. There’s absolutely no land in sight, just a band of blazing red across the horizon. For some reason, despite the fact that it’s completely dark, the water is an almost fluorescent blue like the sea in the Pacific somewhere, absolutely clear.

And trail of blood is flowing beneath him, mixing with it, and it takes Dick a few moments to realize that it’s coming from his own body. Somehow, he’s not as alarmed as he should be.

He swims a bit, the weaves growing stronger the more he struggles, and when he looks down again the entire ocean beneath him is deep red and dark like the rest of the night. He feels something bump his leg, then the arm on the other side. He stops, gasping for breath, his arms fighting to keep him above the water as he scans the water. His first thought is an animal, shark, dolphin, something big, but after a few moments he sees a hand come up from the water. A foot floats up somewhere nearby, wearing an army-issue boot. Even closer a face hovers just beneath the surface, pale and untouchable like a marble statue. One of his soldiers.

When he looks to the other side, another drifts into view, this time with his eyes open.

Dick feels himself start to panic, heart racing, trying to swim away from the bodies, but as soon as he’s started moving he bumps into more of them. The next face has blood trailing down it’s cheek that, paradoxically, hasn’t been washed away by the water.

The last one is Nixon.

****

When he opens his eyes, Nixon is already watching him quietly from his chair.

He doesn’t look away, but mercifully doesn’t ask any questions either.

“More Dostojewski?”, he asks quietly, eyes flicking to the guys sleeping next to them.

Dick doesn’t really trust his voice yet, so he just nods.  
  


****

The next morning a nurse is sitting in Nixon’s chair, writing something on her clipboard.

She looks up as soon as she notices him stir and gives him one of those overly sweet, vaguely condescending smiles that tells Dick she’s probably new here. She’s got gorgeous blonde hair, woven into two braids that fall down almost to her waist, her uniform meticulously ironed.

He guesses second week at most.

Behind her, he can see the whole building in the daylight for the first time. It really is a church, not quite as grandiose as it looked like during the nights, but still massive with a beautiful stone altar at the front, the edges of the figurines on the sides tipped with gold.

Bare army-beds are squeezed into every available space in between the columns and even around the altar all the way to the back, some of them without proper bedding.

Most of them are already full.

“How are you feeling?”

There’s the hint of an accent in her words, a barely there tilt at the end of her words. French maybe, or Dutch.

“Alright.”

She laughs a little too quickly in a way that immediately reminds him of family dinners, that ugly, sharp sound when you don’t really want to but think you should.

“Well, let’s see.”

Her fingers push up the shirt and she frowns for the briefest of moment, less guarded than the medics were yesterday, before she reaches into her lap for the rolls of bandages, unrolls them with sure, practised motions.

“It’s bled a little during the night, but that’s normal. It’s only been a day after all.”, she explains as she begins to unwrap the old bandage, “you should keep it as still as possible for at least another week or so and it should heal nicely.”

Her eyes lift to meet his, the corner of her mouth twitching.

“You’re going to have a hell of a scar, though.”

****

Her name is Renée, 20 years old from a small town in New Jersey. Her mother is French and, like him, like most of them, she came here because she felt like she had to help somehow.

They end up talking about growing up in a small town, art and the fact that his sister has the same name and after he promises her to draw her she manages to sneak out a few pieces of paper and a pencil for him from the nurses’ supply barely an hour later. He’s leaning against the wall behind him, sketching the face of the sleeping soldier in the bed to his right when Nixon slides back into the chair beside it with two steaming plates in his hand, blocking the view. It’s army-issue stew straight from the tin from the look and smell of it, mixed with a few potatoes and what’s probably supposed to be pieces of very meagre meat.

“So you’ve been fraternising with the nurses”, he says instead of any kind of greeting, eyes bright with that same kind of subdued humour he noticed on the first day as he passes Dick the plate, “when I saw them giggling I thought that might have something to do with you. It’s amazing, really, I haven’t seen them this excited for weeks.”

He pushes the papers from his lap to make room for the plate, then takes the battered metal spoon Nixon’s holding out for him.

“Thank you, but you know I can still walk, right?” 

“Yeah, I know. But then you wouldn’t get the latest gossip along with it.”

He leans back in his chair, one arm draped casually over the back.

“You see the pretty one with the black hair? Red scarf around her head?”

Dick follows his gaze for a moment to a young girl carrying away a load of dirty laundry and gives a brief, non-committal nod, more out of politeness than anything else, as he gathers a bit of the food on his spoon and brings it to his mouth.

His stomach clenches at the mere smell and he realizes that he actually is hungry, not exactly surprising considering he hasn’t eaten in almost a day now.

“Her name is Annie. Anyway, rumour has it that she has a little thing for soldier-boy over there next to the entrance with the brown hair and big eyes, one of the RAF fighters who came in last week. German anti-aircraft battery, very ugly.”

He pauses to try a spoon-full of his stew, too, barely chewing before he swallows it down like a shot. It’s not entirely unwarranted, Dick decides.

“Apparently he was pretty into her, too and everything seemed to be going perfectly fine until one of the transports brought back what was left of his things from his unit, completely out of nowhere, along with a few more wounded soldiers. Among them was a small picture of his high-school sweetheart waiting for him back in the States, absolutely gorgeous, polka-dot dress and red lipstick and all, with the same, dark hair.”

Dick snorts at that while he takes up another spoon-full, and Nixon’s grin widens as though he’s just given him a standing ovation.

“Yeah, I know it’s so cliché right?”

He pulls a small loaf of bread out from his supply bag and twists off a slice and gives it to Dick with the kind of easy, absent-minded familiarity that normally takes years and hours of talks to form before he takes one for himself. Dick’s doesn’t quite know what to do with that.

“Well what did she do?”

“What he deserved, honestly. I don’t think they’ve spoken since. And there’s a very cute Major from the navy three beds down.”

This time Dick does laugh, startling two medics who are just walking past.

It’s kind of disturbing, how creaky and unused it feels after just a few months. Another one of those things you unlearn simply because you don’t need them here under the man-made law of the Savannah. He wonders how many more there have been, without any of them noticing.

He’s not sure he wants to know.

“Wait, it gets better. According to sister Lea the latest development, as of this morning, is that she talked about it to a mutual friend, also a nurse, called Mel. Mel is the one with the reddish hair, kind of like yours, but you know, longer.”

“Mel, as it turns out, was into officer number two as well and, apparently having the emotional subtlety of a thirteen-year old with their first crush, she went to that officer on her next shift and told him that she had a fiancé back in her village so if she ever tried to make a move on him he’d know how to react. Completely friendly, of course. Just trying to save him the heartbreak and all that.”

  
He’s produced a metal flask from somewhere and takes a quick sip, swallowing it without even wincing before putting it down beside his chair afterwards with the same, casual ease he’d shared his food with.

“What she told her was of course that yeah, she should go for it, he would definitely be interested and yes, she’s pretty sure she actually heard him talking about her a few times while she changed his dressings. I think you can imagine the rest.”

Dick laughs again and it feels just as foreign.

“It’s kind of comforting to realize that no matter what happens, the basic human problems, dreams and desires remain the same isn’t it?”

He looks up at Dick from his plate for a moment, eyes flickering over his face in that kind of teacherly, expectant way that would make it feel wrong to say anything other than what he wants to hear. He’s right, though. Even the outwardly bravest, the ones who jump into German artillery fire with barely any hesitation, feared waking up and realizing one day that they’d lost that – the ability to feel. And Dick had never counted himself as one of them.

“Yeah.”, he finally says, “Kind of.”

As he watches Nixon eat somehow the only thing that sticks is the fact that he’s trying to make Dick laugh. Like the bread, it seems significant in a way his brain failed to catch up on. It triggers some kind of deep-set self-protective instinct that keeps screaming at him to figure it out, and figure it out soon, or he’d regret it. It feels like sensory overload, everything rushing past faster than he can process it.

Nixon takes another sip from the bottle, presumably to wash down the taste of the food, the plate empty now. He takes Dick’s once he’s done without Dick even having to ask.

“I’ll be back.”, he says with another grin, “Heal up, don’t do anything heroic.”

Then, before Dick can say anything, he’s gone.

****  
  


It’s evening the next time, just after dark, the torches being lit one by one the recesses of the church. In the back the first queues are starting to form in front of the meals – those who can still walk. He’s brought two sandwiches, thickly smeared with some kind of cream and a few bits of crude cheese and hands one to Dick once he’s flopped down in the chair. He looks bone-tired, skin incredibly pale and clammy and the fine lines around his eyes emphasized in the dim light of the torches. There’s been three new trucks of wounded from the line today just after breakfast that had to be made room for and Dick hasn’t even seen him in the queue for lunch afterwards. From what he gathered from the nurses when they were passing his bed, almost half of them died within the first few hours.

“Do you miss anything from before the war?”, he says after they’ve finished the sandwiches, Dick settled against the wall. He’s pulled out the flask again, idly playing with the cap.

“I mean not the obvious things, like having a proper bed or not potentially dying every day. Something you’d never thought you’d think about here or care you didn’t have anymore.”

It’s kind of a weird question to ask, just like that, and more difficult to answer than Dick thought it would be mostly because it’s strangely hard to remember that life was ever different than this. The only clear image he has is of his family during the summer two years ago, sea breeze, his mother’s perfume, the same one since he was a child, the bright lights on the other side of the harbor. Maybe it’s an effect of the war, too, that even experiences from years before that have nothing to do with it are taking on a kind of sharp, visceral and intensely sensuous quality, defined by their feel, emotions, colors and smells rather than anything being said or done. He’d tried to sketch a few portraits today, friends, people back home, and he’d not been able to remember a single face completely from memory.

“Being able to make mistakes.”, he says in the end, because it’s the one thing that’s been constant through all of this, “Or more specifically, being able to make mistakes without them being potentially fatal for everyone around you. And yourself, obviously.”

Nixon laughs and raises the metal flask in Dick’s general direction.

“Cheers to that.”

Dick watches his throat work, the way he slumps back in his chair and closes his eyes once he’s swallowed it down, fingers loosely grasping the flask in his lap.

“What’s yours?”

Nixon’s silent for a while and Dick’s about to forget about it and turn back to eating when he suddenly opens his eyes and says:

“Music.”

Dick wordlessly settles back into the wall, waiting for him to say more.

Nixon’s eyes drop to his hands, flexing and unflexing on the flask.

“I’ve always loved concerts, the smell, the lights, the shiny fabric of the women’s dresses and that low thrill of excitement hanging in the room just before everyone goes in and then again before the curtain opens and the orchestra is tuning their instruments. And there was this evening not long before we left for Europe – actually, it was so close that we technically weren’t even allowed out anymore, but it was the last few weeks and days before the big War so the officers kind of turned a blind eye on it.”

He smiles up at Dick, the first one that actually reaches his eyes and even his cheeks are a little more flushed. Dick’s not even sure he’s really seeing him in that moment.

“I went to visit a few friends in New York and as a kind of farwell-present they took me to the Opera. It was the first time in a while, obviously, and they played La Traviata with this beautiful set piece of fine, dark wood and white curtains, Violetta in this amazing red dress, her hair open and a voice like an angel, Alfredo in a black suit and yeah, I’d give a lot to be able to ear and feel that again. I actually even brought a few records in my footlocker but as you know there’s not much free-time here to get to them.”

  
“Yeah.”, Dick says, suddenly incredibly tired, “I know.”

A pair of privates walk past him with their plates, one of them with a bandage on his head, the other with his arm strapped in an improvised cast. Nixon puts the flask down beside him and reaches for the book the book that’s still lying next to the stool he’s sitting on, opened where they’d left of last night. Dick’s gaze drops to the finely printed, well-worn pages, then up to Nixon’s face again.

“I was serious, you know.”, he adds, tilting his chin towards it, “They need you more than I do.”

“Yeah I know. And they’ll get my attention when they do, don’t worry.”, Nixon grins, “For now, though, I really am curious. You must be to, that was a massive cliffhanger.”

He keeps looking at Nixon as he flips a few pages back to the place they left off.

His hair is catching a bit of gold from the fire, dancing just around the edges.

“Why me?”, he asks, because it’s the one thing that sticks about this, somehow.

Nix looks up as though to check if that was a serious question, then says firmly and without hesitation in the tone of an exasperated parent explaining to his four-year old for the third time why hauling himself from the couch isn’t a good idea:

“Because you’re interesting.”

****

“What does the L stand for?”

They’re sitting just outside the church in front of what must have been an old side-entrance, sharing a cigarette. It’s not something he usually does, which is why he’d coughed at the first drag like a beginner, but it somehow seems fitting that night. When Nixon wordlessly offers him his flask for a drink after a while, however, he shakes his head. It’s been a relatively quiet day, only one transport, no deaths so far and they’ve been able to release four of the boys even if it’s only back to the line, not home.

Dick gets the feeling no one here tries to think about that too much.

“Lewis.”, Nixon says after a few moments, “Most call me Lew. Or Nix.”

“You never asked me for mine.”

“Yeah, I -”

He clears his throat, stretching his legs out in front of him. Their soles are worn almost completely through, the sides are caked with dirt and the toe-area scuffed from use.

“I haven’t done that with anyone since the war started, it’s kind of become a thing. It probably sounds very cynical, saying it like that, but it’s easier to forget them if – when – they get killed if I don’t know their names.”

“Alright yeah, I get that.”

Dick cranes his neck back to look at the sky, the milky way stretching almost all the way across his field of view with only a few, wispy clouds hanging around the edges. He feels Nixon look at him from the side.

“I saw a couple of boys from my company do it with the replacements and they told me the same thing, that they just can’t let themselves get to know them and then watch them get killed one after the other. It happened a lot.”

He turns his head to face Nix, who’s still watching him.

“In case you do want to know and I don’t get killed: It’s Richard. Most call me Dick.”

To his surprise, Nix grins at that before he turns back to the road.

“Yeah we’ll see.”

On the opposite side of the road a soldier on makeshift crutches Dick’s seen in the food-queue a few times and a young girl have come out of one of the abandoned building into the light of a streetlamp. She’s leaning against the wall with one shoulder and he’s smiling at her as he says something and brushes a strand of dark hair from her face, both completely oblivious to their presence. It takes Dick a while to put the pieces together and realize that she’s the nurse Nix called Annie in his story.

“Well, it looks like she found another soldier alright.”, he says when he notices Nix’s gaze fixing on them as well. He chuckles as he raises his flask for another drink.

“That she did. Sister Lea’s going to love this.”

****

Doing nothing was always something that seemed to go against every single instinct he had.

It seemed an utter waste when there was so little time and so much to explore, to learn, to read, to experience. His mother could barely keep him in bed even with a 39 degree fever and even then his mind was still racing, doing what his body couldn’t. She used to say that he walked through life already at ten years old with the restlessness of a ninety-year old who’s sure he hasn’t got much time left. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t surprised when he joined up.

He’d been sure it would be hell here, too, in this respect, that he would be out of here in a few hours, and at one point, between one sentence and the next he realizes that Nixon’s somehow actually managed to distract him. For those hours, days, endless nights, the gentle rise and fall of his voice was enough to open entire worlds.

Enough to make him not mind staying.

Almost enough to make him forget.

****

Even so, by the fifth day, he’s ready to go out of his skin.

He’s never really understood why even seriously soldiers often left as soon as he could, but he thinks he does now. Even though it’s completely irrational as well, the whole place, noise, the smell feels like a trap, like the dying around is somehow contagious and going to get you, too, if you stay to long. The sensation is so overwhelming it’s as though he can’t breathe unless he does, the air thick with it. He swings his legs over the edge of the bed and pushes himself up to stand, a little unsteadily. One of the nurses who’s just changing a boy’s bandages closer by sees him and for a moment she looks as though she’s going to tell him lay back down and rest but whatever it is she sees in his face makes her reconsider it and she just nods briefly.

The same irritation, that irrational feeling of being treated like a child drifts to the surface again and he nods courtly in return before heading in the direction of the door.

Two nurses two rows down beside a column are drawing sheets over the body of a young soldier who died during the night. It’s immediately soaked through with his blood.

A few soldiers have gathered on a bed nearby, playing cards without even shooting them a gaze. It’s simply lost its novelty for them after all they’ve seen.

Next to entrance, two young girls whose cheeks and faces are still full and soft with the last remnants of childhood are stirring some kind of soup over an open fire for dinner, smiling at him when he passes. He smiles back, more on instinct than anything else. He’s just stepped outside when a private who’d been sitting on the steps there with a soldier from another company, sees him and instantly stands up so sharply that he almost knocks over what’s left of his lunch. He’s a little older, early twenties maybe, a light, blond stubble around his chin.

He salutes, a little awkwardly, gaze drifting curiously over Dick’s uniform.

“Sir.”

“Do I know you, private?”

“No but I –”

He clears his throat and Dick can hear his friend behind him unsuccessfully trying to hold back his laughter.

“Well, I guess I kind of do. We heard a lot about what you did, after the big day. I’m very proud to meet you, Sir, you’re all real, proper heroes to us.”

Dick feels the corner of his mouth twitch, amused.

“Thank you, private. It’s good to meet you, too.”

“Sir."

The boy salutes again before he quickly scrambles back to his place on the steps and as Dick passes them he sees the his friend nudging him with his elbow, now laughing full-on as the boy buries his head in his hands. He presses his lips together to supress the smile rising up but doesn’t quite manage either. Nixon’s perched on a pile of discarded, wooden crates, smoking.

A few feet away some of the medics have started a small fire, a less monstrous cauldron suspended above it on a few haphazardly meddled-together pieces of metal junk and wire.

By the time Dick gets to him, he’s smiling broadly, eyes glinting with laughter.

“Hero, huh?”

Dick just rolls his eyes as he leans against the wall next to him.

“You know, you really shouldn’t be walking around that much yet. It wasn’t a ricochet.”

“Yeah thanks mum.”

He nods towards the cauldron with the medics standing around it, warming their hands.

It’s gotten unusually cold over night for mid-June after the heavy rain of the past two days and the temperatures are dropping harshly now that the sun is setting. It casts the whole church in warm browns, edged with fiery reds before it trails off into an unreal, dark blue.

“Coffee?”

“Yeah.”

He follows him over, hovering beside him as he fills a mug from the more or less clean pile at the side and puts the pan back on the stove. It smells amazing and incredibly, breathtakingly familiar.

“Thanks.”

He takes the warm mug and cradles it in his hands, just breathing for a few moments before he raises it to his lips to take a sip.

The taste is familiar, too, strong and aromatic.

“That’s real coffee.”

“It is, yeah, we got it last week.”, Nixon grins, “One of the battalion COs still owed me a favour.”

Dick smiles back, sitting down beside him on the crates.

“Nice.”

They drink in silence for a while, watching the darkness settle further. The men put out the fire not long after, too obvious a target even here now that it’s dark. Dick catches a few bits of murmured conversation as they pass them on their way back in to their shift, taking their empty cups with them.

“You know I can’t stay here forever right?”

Nix raises an eyebrow at him from the side.

“It’s not even been a week.”

“I need to find them, Nix.”

He sees something flash in Nix’s eyes at his name, the barest shudder, before he schools his features into careful neutrality again. It’s so different from the bright excitement and subdued humour he usually sees there that it doesn’t quite fit.

“They could be anywhere by now.”, he says eventually, voice calm, “and they probably think you’re dead. Even I did, until I felt your pulse, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but you were in a pretty bad way.”

“I still have to try.”

The first mortar hits a few blocks from the church.

Dick can hear screams, the sound of answering artillery fire, then a few seconds of silence just before the second one strikes, even closer this time. Dust and parts of bricks and stones are flying through the air, a woman in a bright red dress stumbling across the street opposite them with a baby pressed to her chest. A platoon of soldiers jogs past her in the direction of the first hit. Behind them, the church bells he’d thought were gone start ringing, instantly drowning out all other sounds with a low, steady thud that vibrates through the stones. He feels every single instinct from those two years of training kick in before his consciousness catches up, his breathing speeding up and muscles tensing, and it’s not until he feels Nixon’s hand on his arm that he realizes he’s been reaching for the place where his weapon would be and finding nothing but air.

He looks at him for a few seconds, his own breaths loud between them, and he’s about to tell him that there’s no way he’s going to just stand there and watch when the third crashes directly into the main body of church somewhere to their right. The blast shoves them both into the wall, Nixon’s back hitting the concrete hard and Dick landing next to a stack of old, wooden crates by the door, his shoulder crashing painfully into the edge of one of them. Inside, voices are shouting over the noise and Dick can hear the sound of steps running on the concrete.

Two medics pass them, holding one of the nurses between them. Her hair’s full so of dust that the colour is barely visible, falling loosely over her shoulders and her dress is torn in several places. She’s limping, head lolling onto her chest. Nixon’s gaze meets his and immediately drops to his ribs, then back up to his eyes, but Dick shakes his head. Not now.

The back wall in the area of the altar has almost entirely collapsed, the sky stark black behind it, the floor completely covered in debris and dust. A few pieces of wood from the beds lie in between the stones, cracked like dry bones, some of them still covered in bloody pieces of linen. In a few places there are still small, sweltering fires, illuminating the silhouettes and faces of people stumbling by in the direction of the entrance in stark flashes, the smoke drifting lazily up to the bombed-out ceiling. Since it’d been dinner time most of those who could still walk had gathered at the cauldron near the entrance to get their portion or take back something for those who couldn’t and got lucky. Two or three are still standing there, hand braced on the wall, coughing. The rest, not so much.

Car tires screech in front of the building, followed by the sound of voices and running footsteps as three teams of two with stretchers jog into the building. They must have been somewhere near headquarters, getting supplies or bringing in new wounded, and seen the hit.

They push past them without even giving them a glance. Without really thinking about it, Dick follows one of the teams that’s heading for a boy lying near the edge of the rubble, the fabric above his arm soaked with blood all the way down to his elbow. His body looks unnaturally distorted, limbs sticking out at odd, uncomfortable angles and his face looks so pale that Dick’s sure he’s dead for a moment until he moans quietly. He tries to drag himself upright when he sees them, but immediately falls back onto his back again, whimpering, his chest heaving.

“Get his legs.”, one of the medics says, still not looking at him, “Quickly.”

There’s a cast on his right shin where it’s pretty obviously broken, so Dick tries to grab him by the ankles as gently as possible while the medic pulls him up by his armpits. He still groans, a desperate, ragged sound from the back of his throat, when they lift him off the ground and onto the stretcher, then take it up. At the backdoor of the van someone else from inside takes to pull it in and Dick’s hand slides to the edge of the frame and off just before the door is roughly shoved shut in front of them and the motor springs to live. The medics have already moved off again, carrying the stretcher with him. Despite the fact that he’s turned out to be quite good at functioning when others can’t, staying calm in the midst of the worst cause, he feels completely out of his depth here and worse still, completely useless.

The two girls who’d been cooking lunch brush past him as he slides back in with the next tem and turn to the left in front of the entrance where the rest of those who don’t need to lie down have gathered. On the left side at the front, just before the altar, there’s a little crypt he somehow never noticed while he was here, the inside completely in shadow now. One of the four columns in front of hit is broken, but somehow it held apart from a few stone blocks from the roof that have landed close by. A shattered crucifix lies on the shallow steps leading up to it, one of the legs of the Jesus figure broken off.

Dick’s ready to move back to the altar area when he suddenly hears something that sounds like a shaky sob come from the inside, a broken, whet sound that makes him instantly stop in his tracks. He tries to follow it, slowly moving closer to the crypt’s entrance as he listens for a repetition, and almost stumbles over the foot sticking out the side near the inner right column, partly hidden in the darkness. He jerks back instinctively at first, then catches himself and moves back to get a closer look. Since they’re sheltered by the rotunda of the crypt and that part of the church has not been directly hit, the torches on the wall there are still burning and illuminating enough to make out a few features of the room. Apparently this was the operation unit at some point, a metal table and a low box with surgical tools spread out over it still standing in a corner. The table is covered with supplies now, some still closed, some half-unpacked and a few labelled boxes shoved under the table and into the other corners.

Further back, fresh uniforms are folded on a rickety chair that’s missing one of its back legs.

The boy is slouched against the wall, lying on his side with his back pressed against the wall and it takes one look to see that the problem is his arm this time. An old, golden chandelier from the original crypt is lying near him, probably what hit him, and the arm is hanging limply at his side, the boy’s chest moving with the ragged breaths he’s sucking in. Dick can see only half of his face, clammy skin and closed eyes, but he’s obviously young, too, barely out of his teens. He’s got dark hair, sticky with dust.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Nix walking by towards the altar with the two medics.

“Over here!”, he shouts, crouching down on the stone by the feet, “bring a stretcher.”

He turns back to the boy who’s opened his eyes, bright blue in the dirt smeared on his face.

For a moment he just looks at Dick, no recognition or any reaction at all, then shakily pushes himself up onto his elbow and tries to sit up. The movement must have moved his arm because he groans at the end of it, leaning back against the wall.

Sweat is glistening in the hollow of his throat, his temple.

“What’s your name, private?”, Dick asks, putting a gentle hand on his other shoulder.

He relaxes a little at the touch, slumping more heavily into the stone behind him.

“Neil, Sir.”

Dick scans the supplies again.

If he knew what to do he’d probably be able to find everything here.

“We’re going to get you out, Neil.”, he says instead, “I promise.”

“What happened, sir?”

“We don’t know yet. Mortars, German artillery. No word as yet where they’ve come from. Or why. This sector was supposed have been cleared two weeks ago.”

“It’s all gone, isn’t it? I was just –”

He interrupts himself and swallows, eyes bright with tears, clearly struggling to hold onto the last bits of control, but Dick knows he’d rather die than cry now. Not in front of an officer.

“Will you stay, sir?”, he finishes eventually and it sounds so young that Dick feels his breath knocked out of him. He smiles at the boy, letting his hand slide down from his arm.

“Of course.”

“Move away please.”

Two medics kneel beside Dick as he shifts to the side to give them more room, lying the stretcher on the ground while one of them asks the boy a few quick questions. He groans again at the pain when they hoist him up and onto the stretcher even though they’re obviously trying to be careful and it’s only then that he notices that he boy has taken his hand at some point, loosely holding it.

“God, he’s a kid.”, Nixon says quietly as slides up beside him.

“Yeah. I know.”

The medics begin to move towards the entrance and he follows them beside the stretcher, watching the boy as he closes his eyes. His fingers twitch on his hand, cool against his skin.

Outside, they stop in front of another truck, open in the back, the loading area already almost completely packed with three other stretchers. Dick’s about to pull away and fall back when the grip of the boy’s hand suddenly tightens around his, strong like a vice.

“Where are they taking me, sir?”

Dick feels his throat close up abruptly and it’s one of those moments where the enormity of the responsibility here strikes him, unquestionedly and overwhelmingly, because he knows it’s not him the boy is asking for, it’s his mother. The comfort of the brush of her fingers as she pushes the hair back from a feverish, sweaty forehead. Her smile as she fixes a bandage on the knee he hit trying out his bike at ten years old, extra big just to make him feel like he’s a true hero. The gentle tilt of her voice singing while he watches her stir the sauce in the pan on the stove. And he doesn’t know how to be that mother when he’s still basically a kid himself, just a few years older than that boy is. He feels more like a young girl holding her first child after two weeks without sleep, moving more or less on instinct alone and afraid to break something this tiny and fragile.

The medic closes to him shots him a pointed look to say something, and do it fast.

The other is already pulling the door open.

“Somewhere safe.”, he says, almost convincingly, “Don’t worry, it’ll be alright. You won’t be alone and nothing is going to happen to you.”

The stretcher is pushed inside roughly, the medic apparently concluding that the conversation is over or that he doesn’t care either way, and Dick’s hand slips away from its side.

It flexes and unflexes at his side with the phantom touch of the boy’s grip.

When he looks down, he sees that it’s covered in his blood.

****

The Germans somehow disappear as fast as they have come.

They must have positions somewhere a few miles further down to fall back to, which makes sense, considering that it’s a more or less strategically unimportant village with no supplies or other goods and so far from the line that staying here would mean staying to get killed.

The only valuable asset is – was – the field hospital. A hospital full of incapacitated, mostly American and British soldiers. They walk until it’s completely dark and it takes a long time for Dick’s restlessness to settle enough to consider making camp somewhere. Nowhere seems satisfying enough – too exposed, to close to a town, too restricted a view over the surrounding countryside. He hates the feeling, because it’s beyond all reason, counterproductive and annoyingly out of his control, a vague, maddening itch that intensifies and intensifies the more he tries to reign it in. He’d thought he’d mastered it somewhere in between briefings, training runs and jumping behind German lines into Normandy, but apparently it’s still there and just as distracting. Part of him is kind of watching his reaction detachedly with his mother’s displeased curl of her mouth whenever he did something recklessly stupid.

Eventually, they settle at the edge of a stretch of woods between two low hills, a river running past nearby. They get a small fire going, which is stupidly dangerous, of course, even if the area seems relatively quiet, but Nix insists on at least looking at his wound before they put it out again. Dick’s sitting on the edge of a rotten tree-trunk and Nix is kneeling between his legs, carefully pulling off the bandage as Dick holds his shirt up and out of the way.

“Hold still.”

He lets it drop to the ground, then reaches into his pocket for a new one, still rolled up and unused but a little flattened from being carried. The wound doesn’t look infected or otherwise unusual, but it’s still angry red, fading into purple around the edges and there’s a bit of dried blood on one side down to the edge of his trousers. He hadn’t even noticed that he’d started bleeding. Nix pulls out his flask and lets a bit of the whiskey drop on it and Dick braces himself against the burn, teeth ground together firmly.

“It’s not ideal, but it’ll work.”, Nix says as he screws the cap back on.

He reaches out to fix the new bandage, his body drifting a little closer towards his with the momentum, and Dick’s suddenly incredibly aware of Nix’s fingers against his skin, the way his stomach rises against them with his slow, controlled breaths. They’re cool, but soft, every movement smooth and precise with long practice.

“It looks like the fresh bleeding stopped quite a while ago, the clotting is good and it looks reasonably good otherwise, too. Still no infection.” 

“Won’t they be looking for you?”, he asks, hissing when Nix’s finger brushes over the middle of the wound, “You saw the situation, they’ll be struggling to get settled and catch up with the work.”

As soon as it’s out he knows that it wasn’t the best thing to say and when Nix’s jaw tightens and he roughly pushes away from him Dick’s sure for a moment that he’s crossed some kind of line, but he just settles beside him instead, back against the tree-stump. His profile is illuminated by the fire, sharpening his features.

“They’ll be going closer to the line, which is probably also where your company is, so you could say you incidentally happen to be going my way. I might as well make sure you don’t get killed, we’ve spent too much time changing those bandages and feeding you for that.”

Dick pulls his shirt down and slides to the ground next to Nix and, gratifyingly, Nix doesn’t move away of flinch when their shoulders brush. Dick’s hand comes to rest in his lap, fingers tapping restlessly on his knee, still full of the boy’s dried blood.

“Well, then I’m glad you’re here.”, he whispers and it’s true, he realizes.

Stupdily, recklessly, helplessly he really is.

Nix’s head snaps up, expression still carefully blank.

He looks at him steadily for a few moments and Dick waits for him to say something else, but in the end all he does is nod curtly in acknowledgement before he turns away towards the fire again. His feet are stretched out towards the warmth, legs casually draped one over the other. Above his right boot his trousers have ripped at some point, a clear, wide tear just above his ankle. Dick suddenly feels like a teenager in the middle of his first date, and not one that’s going particularly well. Unbidden and unhelpfully, his mind supplies the scene from a few nights ago, stardust in the sky and Nix’s voice saying _Because you’re interesting._ It’d struck him then, but he hadn’t been able to pinpoint why at the time. Now he does. He hadn’t said what he’d just said because he didn’t want Nix here.

He’d said it because he didn’t think _Nix_ wanted to be here. He’d offered him a painless, easy way out. Maybe it’s always been like that. Maybe it’s another reason why he’s ended up here that he had never consciously been aware of. Then he looks at the flask, sitting on the ground between Nix’s legs with his fingers still loosely wrapped around it and he thinks that he might not be the only one.

He’s not sure if the memory is actually his or if he’s just watched the scene, because, like the others, it’s purely sensory, the drag of fine lance, the warm smell of skin after an afternoon of late-summer sun, shoulder to shoulder, a brush of hair against his shoulder. A bright smile, the taste of freshly plucked, white berries, salt sticking to his fingers. The drag of skin against skin, finger against finger. One of Nix’s hands has come to rest on the damp ground between them, palm down. Slowly, Dick inches his hand towards it, keeping his gaze fixed on the fire, feeling the grass slide into the spaces between his splayed fingers as they move across it, the coolness of the earth.

Then, suddenly, his pinky finger touches Nix’s, warm and dry like the memory, and Dick only just manages to hold in an embarrassing gasp. Nix doesn’t look at him, or say anything, just like Dick expected, but he feels his pinky finger twitch slightly, chasing the contact.

Dick’s eyelids drift shut for a moment, the phantom heat of a whisper against his ear, fingers digging into skin, the sounds of ragged pants and gunshots. They flutter open slowly in stark, interrupted flashes of bright reds, oranges and yellows. Fire. They should have put it out, by now. They would. Soon. When Nix sees it, his lips twitch slightly, the briefest hint of a smile.

“Sleep.” 

“Not yet.”

“Sleep, Dick.”, he repeats, “Nothing’s going to come and get you. You’re allowed to.”

For a moment, Dick wants to protest, but he actually is tired to the point where he can feel his eyes burning with it, warm for the first time in a long time and it’s incredibly tempting.

His gaze back on the fire, Nix shifts back into his blankets and then, very quietly, starts to sing, a gentle, melancholy tune whose notes hang around the air like smoke long after he’s finished with them. He’s got a surprisingly beautiful voice, warm, sure and honey-smooth.

****

In the morning light it’s clear that they’ve ended up close to another deserted village tucked into a little bend in the stream, one or two farms, a few shops and two large buildings at the edge for what must have been the main square. One sticks out particularly because it has several finely carved lions in front of the entrance, a large door with stone ornaments around it and huge, painted windows and generally looks like it’s some kind of feverish mirage of a nineteenth century Parisian, urban home dreamed up by one of the country boys stuck here that doesn’t fit the rest of the village at all. Even though one of the lions is missing his head and another a paw, the door is completely kicked in, half of the windows are shattered and the paint is peeling it still looks majestic. It’s the one they try first, Dick’s gun held at the ready as they step inside though a side-entrance on the right and Nix following quietly behind, hovering at his shoulder. They’re immediately standing in the middle of what must have been the cloakroom, old uniform jackets and elegant women’s fur coats swinging everywhere and dust dancing in the beam of light coming in from a window somewhere above them.

Most of the uniforms are German, Wehrmacht, a few of them SS. The caps are carefully placed in a row on a table in the back.

Dick shares a brief look with Nix before he starts moving again, their feet unnaturally loud on the stone floor beneath. The tiles are scratched and worn with use as well, but he can still make out a fine, floral decor in bright colours. On the threshold of the room on the others side it changes into a chessboard-pattern, clumsily added to the older tiles that stretches out into the main hall. A few tables have been put up in one corner, some still filled with plates of bread, ham, cheese and olives, wine bottles in metal buckets. The ice has long since melted into dirty water, but the bottles are still there, most of them half or completely empty. The table-cloths are fine, deep red satin, the edges embroidered in gold. Overhead, torn swastika flags are hanging on thin ropes above them like a strange kind of garland. A handbag is lying beside one table and close-by Dick’s eyes catch on a sleek, black high-heel shoe. High, white stuccoed ceilings trailing off into thick columns.

There are signs of what made them abandon that party in a hurry, too – bullet holes in the walls, a broken window above, black traces of a long burned-out fire in the corners.

“At least they left the food.”, Nix whispers beside him, picking up one of the pieces of bread. It still looks reasonably edible, only a little dry and hard, which whatever happened here can’t have been very long ago. The cheese is sweating, damp on the surface, and the ham smells even from where he’s standing, but the olives look to be in halfway respectable condition as well and they stuff the rest of the bread into their pockets. It’s eerily quiet and Dick feels on the edge the same way he did the day before, eyes drifting back to the door they’d come though and the window even though objectively, it’s very unlikely that the Germans have come back since then. They would have never let them get this far inside if they were still here. 

“Yeah, it doesn’t look like we’ll have much luck in the other buildings.”, he says, lowering his gun slowly, “They must have bombed the whole town.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Dick sees Nix pick up one of the bottles and sniff at it, then put it back with a look of absolute disgust.

“We’re definitely heading in the right direction, at least.”

In another corner there’s an old chair, painted white and with the same, fine red covering and elegantly carved, wooden legs on which someone has put a record player. Nix’s walked up beside it and is running his fingers over the edge of the record on it.

“Wagner.”, he says when he sees Dick looking ,”How cliché. The Führer’s favourite.”

Somewhere on the second floor above a floorboard creaks, followed by a shuffling sound and they booth freeze and look up until they hear the sound of flapping wings. Pigeons.

Nature taking back her territory, quicker than they ever could. His fingers loosen around the weapon and in that moment, in the room from which they’d come, something drops onto the stone floor with a resounding, metallic clang. Dick raises the gun to his chin, fingers tightening again as he focuses the door. Nix moves to stand behind him, but even though he’s got no weapon and would be standing directly in the line of fire if it was a German in there doesn’t hide. His eyes are fixing the door as well, hands clenching at his sides as if in sympathy or mock-imitation. A few moments later they hear soft, light taps against the stone-floor and a small figure emerges, one plump, tiny hand braced against the wooden frame. It’s a girl, dressed in a red striped dress with a round face and short blonde, almost white curls. She looks fragile and almost unreal, like a porcelain doll.

Dick feels himself suck in a breath and, very gradually, the trained reflexes and adrenaline loosen and trail off enough for him to be able to lower the gun again. His eyes catch on his index finger that’s still pressed against the trigger and he stares at it for a long moment, transfixed. One more movement and that girl would have been dead. He could have killed her with nothing more than a thoughtless, almost automatic response. A casualty of that split-second it took his brain to realize she was not a German. He almost did.

Nix’s stepped forward and crouched on the ground to get down to her level, stretching his arms towards her in a silent gesture of invitation. She looks at them, then at his face, as she absent-mindedly takes two of her fingers into her mouth and gnaws at them lightly, her eyes wide. Slowly, she takes a few swaying steps forward in their direction, then stops again.

Nix smiles at her encouragingly, wriggling his fingers and she drops her fingers from her mouth and laughs, a ringing, little sound that echoes in the almost empty hall. After a few more moments her curiosity obviously wins, because she’s suddenly moving forward with single-minded intent, almost running towards him. She raises her arms above her head once she’s in front of him and he catches her around the waist and hoists her up, settling her on his hip while she squeals in delight as if there’s nothing unusual about this at all. Her eyes meet Dick’s from her high vantage point and he feels himself shake, gripping the metal in his hand hard enough to bruise.

It was so close. So incredibly close. Too close. It shouldn’t have been this close.

The girl is distracted by Nix’s nose, booping it and trying to grab it, giggling when he draws back at the last moment and she doesn’t quite manage it.

He vaguely hears Nix ask her for her name, still grinning at her.

Her laugher ceases and she stares at him with the same, wide eyes, studying his expression as though she was trying to find out whether he was serious. Dick is just thinking that she probably doesn’t understand English when she seems to come to her decision and suddenly says:

“Daphne.”

“Really, like the girl from the Greek myth?”, Nix says, “I like that.”

Either from the tone of his voice or the words she must have understood what he said, or at least that it was something positive, and she wriggles around in his arms contently as she giggles again, the curls bobbing around and catching the sunlight from the window.

“Yeah, I can see you’re a real princess, too. Just missing the castle and servants, but we can fix that, don’t you think?”

In the middle of the sentence, footsteps echo above them near where they’d heard the pigeons earlier, quickly running down a staircase. Nix instantly searches his eyes, and Dick jerks his chin towards the entrance of the building.

“Go.”

He still feels dazed, like he’s not quite functioning at full capacity as he should, but it’s not like they’ve got a choice. The Germans certainly won’t care. The girl’s tiny arms come to warp around Nix’s neck when, after a moment’s hesitation, he starts carrying her across the hall and out of the building. Her round fists are gripping the white collar of his uniform and her eyes are fixed on Dick over his shoulder. The footsteps get louder and faster, already close to the room the girl came out of now. If they don’t hurry they’re going to run straight into him. It takes him a single look to asses that he’ll have his back turned to them if he runs out now and never make it, either. The fingers on his weapon are trembling, his breaths echoing shakily in his ears. He can feel his heart pounding against his ribs, but the sensation detached, too, almost clinical.

The other sounds fade in and out as though through water, the weapon cool against his cheek. One of the beams of light from the window is falling uncomfortably into his eyes and he moves a side a bit to step out of it. He catches a brief view of the red strips on the girl’s dress in the door, then there’s another metallic in the cloakroom and a guy in a German uniform storms in, weapon at the ready. For a brief second Dick thinks he’s alone until he hears a second set of footsteps somewhere behind him, just passing into the room where the tiles start. The first shoot hits instantly, cleanly, right above the heart. He uses the time it gains him to fall back towards the door, moving backwards with his body half-turned towards the opening.

The second German doesn’t have a weapon and is wearing a dirty, black SS-uniform and the instant the two facts register and combine Dick knows, with absolute clarity, what he’s going to do, just before he actually throws himself at him with a raw, guttural scream that doesn’t seem to fit his slender body at all. It happens so fast that he doesn’t have time to brace himself and the impact of the guy’s body hits him full on, sending them both tumbling to the ground.

His wound slides against the stone though the fabric of his uniform and Dick only just manages to grind his teeth together to keep from crying out. Even now, he doesn’t want to give the SS-guy the satisfaction. The gun is knocked from his hand by the impact, skittering across the floor towards the door. Dick tries to reach for it, straining his fingers, but the SS-guy reacts quickly, grabbing his wrists and pulling them up and away from it. He’s unexpectedly heavy, too, his full weight sitting across Dick’s hips. The movement as he reaches for Dick’s hand makes it shift directly onto the wound again and this time the low gasp is out before Dick can stop it. The pain is immediate, and blinding, licking up his entire side along his spine and even down into his leg. He feels something wet and realizes that it must have started bleeding again. The guy’s face is quietly triumphant, caught in the beginnings of a smile as he watches Dick’s eyelids flutter with the effort to keep quiet. Behind him, he sees Nix standing in the doorway of the entrance, his hand tightening on the little girls legs where he’s holding her on his hips. It’s probably only her that holds him back.

Dick drags his legs up and, with ragged, little yell, pushes his hips up and to the side, his fingers balling into fists in the guy’s grip. For what seems like a comically long moment, nothing happens and Dick feels himself slag back towards the ground, then, all at once, the guy’s weight shifts above him and he tumbles to the side, dragging Dick with him with the hold he has on his arm. It’s tight enough to bruise and draw blood, the guy’s nails digging into the sensitive skin just below his palm, but Dick barely notices.

The guy groans beneath him, his back arching and hand loosening around his and Dick quickly uses that to pull it free and finally reach for his gun, pinning him firmly down with his weight.

It takes one, calculated swing and he’s out. His fingers slacken on Dick, arms falling down to the floor and face turning away from him to the left like a doll with its strings cut. Like this, he looks younger than he did before, not much more than the boys he saw in the make-shift hospital. He’s got freckles on his nose and a bit of blood is running down his cheek where the gun struck him. Where Dick struck him. Dick can feel the guy’s pulse beneath his fingers where he’s still holding onto his wrist the same way he did onto his.

His lungs are burning.

He drops the gun to the ground with a loud, echoing clatter.

When he looks up, Nix is still staring at him, crouched over the German, his face unreadable. The other hand is gently cupping the back of the girl’s head to keep her from looking back at the scene. It’s not the first time, and not even the worst he’s had to and did do, but it’s the first time he’s done it in front of a child and somehow that’s what Nix expression transforms to and looks like then, a distorted mirror of his own thoughts.

Disappointment.

****

They’re near the edge of the village, a wide, muddy road leading out to the terrain beyond.

Dick is carrying the gun at his side but is still checking their surroundings constantly in well-worn patterns, windows, doors, corners between buildings. If there have been two, there’s no guarantee that there won’t be more. That’s why he sees her first.

She’d been standing in the narrow space between two buildings, behind two large wooden barrels standing at the edge of the roof beneath the rainwater pipe to collect the water running down. Her hair’s pulled back with a simple piece of cloths, a dark, rich blonde, her eyes an unusual, almost black kind of brown and a smattering of freckles similar to the Germans across the bridge of her nose and her cheeks, just much more pronounced. She’s barefoot and the white edges of her dress are caked with mud. It’s yellow, the only spot of colour around.

Given Dick’s twitchy reflexes today, she’s probably lucky.

Her eyes immediately zero in on the girl in Nix’s arms who’d almost fallen asleep by then, her cheek resting against his chest and fingers still playing with his collar.

After a few moments she looks at Dick, then at Nix, then back at the girl and stays there for a while. The girl blinks tiredly, but doesn’t seem to recognize her or generally be particularly interested in her. As if for support, she searches Dick’s gaze again and he can feel Nix looking at him, too. Then, very slowly, the woman stretches out her arms in a silent plea to hand her over, eyes drifting from Dick to Nix.

“Yours?”, Nix asks, his voice rough.

Dick shots a gaze at him, but he’s outwardly completely composed, eyes dry and jaw set. The girl begins to shift in his arms, watching the exchange. The woman doesn’t react to the question, just keeps standing there, arms in front of her, palms up.

“You want to take her? With you?”

This time the girl nods, though she probably doesn’t understand it any more than the previous one. The girl looks between them, wide-eyed. He can see Nix swallow and inexplicably his throat feels tight, too, a raw, itchy rasp like just before you clear it.

When he hesitates, the woman frowns and steps closer.

“Please.”, she says, a single breath. It struggles out of her, clearly foreign on her tongue with a little too many lilts and pauses. Dick doesn’t want to imagine how or why she learned this, of all words. She’s very likely not the actual, biological mother but maybe she simply saw the obvious – that two soldiers on the way to combat are no proper company for and have nothing to offer to a little girl beyond danger, chaos and death.

The moment Nix starts to hand her over the girl grasps what is happening and tries to hold onto his shirt, her hands slipping to his shoulders and gripping the fabric there. She draws an audible, wet breath as though she’s building it up for a wail or a cry and then, a moment later, actually sobs, a soft, pitiful little sound. Her legs start kicking as the woman takes her from him, but she ignores her and tries to settle her on her hip the same way Nix had, then holds her in both arms like a baby once it becomes clear that she won’t hold still enough.

The little girl looks at Dick and that look, too, feels a lot like disappointment. Her arms reach out to him, tiny and plump. Beside him, Nix looks shaken.

The woman nods, rocking her gently in her arms to settle her down a little.

Then, without another word, she slips back between the houses and is gone.

****

“He must have been watching us the entire time and when he saw that we were distracted he took his chance.”

They’re walking through another patch of woods on the other side of town that look exactly the same, dark and towering. Somewhere close-by, the low murmur of the river is just audible behind them. The line of Nix’s shoulders is tense where he’s walking in front of him, step brisk, and it doesn’t even occur to Dick to put it down to anything to that strange experience with the little girl, which is still nagging at him, too, until he suddenly says:

“We can’t afford a situation like that again, not if you want to get there alive.”

Even though, in hindsight, it probably shouldn’t have been it’s so unexpected that for a few moments Dick is startled into stunned silence as the full implication registers. His mouth opens and closes, but his brain doesn’t seem to be able to work past the fact that Nix’s been quietly fuming like this because he’s been worried about _him_.

“Nix, I told you I’m –”

Nix stops and spins around sharply, almost knocking into him with the force of it.

“You’re what, _okay_?”

He spits it out like it’s the worst insult he can think of, eyes burning.

“No, you’re not and you won’t be for another two weeks at least. You won’t serve anyone by just dying senselessly because you’re too stubborn to see when you can’t win. I’ve seen to many die, young, promising men, to let you go through with this.”

For a moment the sheer fury and intensity of it startles Dick and it’s probably only the conditioning of endless sergeants screaming at him that prevents him from flinching, but then he feels his own anger catching up and rising to the surface, his fingers clenching at his sides.

“I’m not asking for your permission. You don’t get to decide what I do, or when I’m okay.”

“Prove it.”

“What?”

Nix steps forward, clearly unimpressed with everything Dick just said.

His eyes are still wild, but his gaze is pointed like glass, sharpened to cut.

“Prove that you’re as okay as you think you are.”

“Are you –”

“Fight me.”

Dick just looks back at him for another few seconds and when Lew takes another step towards him, very slowly, realizes that he’s completely serious. He barely has time to move before Nix’s on him, one foot kicking his legs from beneath him with in one, practiced move, his hips pinning Dick to the ground as he grabs both of his wrists with surprising strength, dragging them up and above Dick’s head. It’s over in barely a minute.

Dick’s panting, eyes wide and mouth slack beneath Lew, the wound throbbing at his side from the shock of the impact. Nix’s knee has come to rest just off the side of it, not quite touching. The grip on Dick’s wrists tightens for a moment, deliberately, to completely drive it home that he’s got him and got him embarrassingly quickly. He’s breathing hard, too, his whole body still tense above Dick while he watches him and there’s a moment when the expression in his eyes finally shifts and softens, but he doesn’t move or get up.

Dick’s legs have fallen open at some point, their bodies practically flush against each other from hip to chest with Lew’s thigh pressing against his groin. He flexes his hands in Lew’s grip, the ground cold and damp beneath his skin and Lew’s gaze flickers to the movement, grazes his, and then drifts, for the briefest moment, down to his lips. Dick’s lips part slightly and Nix’s eyes catch on that, too, completely unabashedly. He leans in almost absent-mindedly, as though he’s not even aware his doing it, slowly swaying into Dick’s space. Their noses drag against each other, Nix’s breath grazing Dick’s cheek, his lips brushing the corner of his mouth, but just before their lips catch he turns his head away and buries his face in Dick’s neck instead.

“See?”, he breathes, “And I haven’t even got a loaded weapon yet.”  
  


****

That night Nix dresses the wound quickly, efficiently, using some of the remaining whiskey from the flask. Dick’s sitting on a mossy boulder this time, hands braced on the cold stone behind him and he’s so used to the burn by then that it barely registers.

He looks at the agile movements of Nix fingers, clean despite everything, nails more or less carefully clipped. The hands of someone who uses them daily.

“It’s the same as that thing with the names, isn’t it?”

He’s been turning it over again and again and it’s the only conclusion that makes remotely sense. Good sense, even. Nix doesn’t stop or look up at him, apparently having expected the question at some point. He doesn’t ask what Dick is talking about, or why he’s bringing it up now.

“More or less.”, he says, tying up the last end. It’s then that he meets his eyes at least, his face carefully neutral again. “It’s generally better, or at least easier, in most cases. Not to know.”

****

He wakes up somewhere just around dawn to the fire burned down to a few smouldering bits of ash, the sky a bloodless, pale grey behind it. The jacket that Nix had been sitting is carefully draped over him. His place is empty and the supplies are cleared away, piled neatly near where he’d been sleeping. It’s only just getting light, the trees and hills behind them still dipped in darkness and standing out starkly against the sky. Maybe that’s what makes it seem like the perfect moment to try the river. The last time they’d had proper showers with warm water and something that qualified remotely as soap was probably in England. But it was war, so it never felt right to complain about it or miss it. In the end, it just didn’t seem to matter, really. Unlike lovers, grenades and bullets didn’t care how you smelled when they hit.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t – isn’t - tempting, though.

Dick considers picking up the gun for a moment, but decides against it. He wouldn’t be quick enough to get it from the edge of the river, anyway, if they really tried hard enough.

A few branches snap beneath his weight and the first birds are just starting to sing somewhere in the trees above as he makes his way past them towards the sound of the water. The air is moist, and smells thickly of pine. It’s a pretty small river, but deep with water clear enough to see the stones beneath, the ground sloping gently towards the water’s edge. The twilight makes the colours oscillate on the surface, dark blue, white, light blue, grey as the weaves lap gently at his feet. A few hundred yards away where the river makes a gentle curve in the direction of the trees two willows bow toward the surface, their branches just grazing it and wiping gently in the early morning wind. Dick reaches up and unbuttons his jacket, carefully, methodically, then lets his shirt drop on top of it. His trousers go next, the chilly air hitting his skin and sending goose bumps along his legs and up his arms. He doesn’t want to spend the entire day in wet clothes so the boxers go as well and once they’re next to the other clothes he moves slowly down the slope until he can feel his toes touch the water. Before he goes in, Dick balls the undershirt up and takes it with him, the one thing he’s not going to miss in the next weeks with the last heat weave of the summer about to set in after the cold and the closest thing to a washcloth he has.

It’s cool from the night and the rain of the day before, but warmer than he’d expected it to be and he relishes the slight burn of it on his skin, the way it sets alight every nerve ending. He walks in slowly, dragging his hands along the surface with the palms down, sliding his fingers into it and letting it run through them. The cloth is soaked by then and he lingers on washing off, drawing it luxuriously slowly over his arms, both sides and armpits, chest, hips, then lower between and along his legs. His eyes drop shut several times and after so long it somehow feels starker, more intimate and forbiddingly decadent than anything sexual ever could.

He tosses it back to the shore once he’s done and it lands somewhere to the right of his clothes. Even though it’s not much use without proper soap, he dips under and scrubs his hair with his fingers, gasping as he comes back up and feels the water run down his back and chest. The same carefully cultivated instincts that kicked in while they were in the theatre make him sense the person on the shore long before he turns around, a change in the atmosphere, a sudden, thick presence that hadn’t been there before.

The first rays of the sun are just breaking through the trees behind Nix, casting him in a diffuse, grey light that doesn’t quite manage to break the darkness completely yet and lets the darkness of his hair and eyes and the two day’s worth of stubble he’s grown stand out even more. Dick has no idea where he came from, or why, but somehow it makes sense, in an inexplicable, irrational kind of way. He’d never really expected it to be a German, Dick realizes. He’d been expecting him.

Nix looks back steadily, watching the path of the water dripping down over his stomach as Dick wades a little closer to the shore. Dick resists the urge to say something first, quietly letting his eyes graze over him in return, waiting. Still not saying anything, Nix raises his fingers to his jacket and starts undoing the buttons, slowly, one by one, his eyes fixed Dick' the whole time. He pushes it apart, just as slowly, over and off his shoulders, then lets it drop unceremoniously on the ground and reaches for the flies of his trousers. The sound of the zipper is incredibly loud in the quiet of the night, emphasized further by how Dick’s attention is focused entirely on him, his hands sliding back to his hips to push the trousers off. Every instinct tells Dick to look away, but he can’t.

Somewhere not far off a bird cries, a breeze rustling through the leaves of the nearby trees. Nix steps out of his trousers with mesmerizing grace and Dick’s eyes wander over the long line of his legs for a moment until he reaches back up for the edge of his boxers. They join the pile on the ground, the water lapping at his skin as he moves down into the lake.

He’s outlined starkly against the dark, skewed silhouettes of the trees and the sheer surrealness and beauty of it is overwhelming in the midst of those blurred weeks of machine gun fire and screams. His eyes keep holding Dick’s, quiet and sure.

When he’s almost directly in front of him Dick’s mouth opens, but before he can say anything Nix puts his finger to his lips. He holds it there for a few moments and then slowly pulls back, tracing the bow of Dick’s lower lip with the same finger to the corner of his mouth, down the line of his jaw to the tip of his chin. With the barest touch he trails it down the line of his throat, over his Adam’s apple, the line of his collarbone, down the middle of his chest. Dick feels it heave against the pad of Nixon’s finger, his pulse rapid against his ribs. Dick’s eyelids drop at the sensation and he’s acutely aware of his breathing, the harsh sound of it between them. Nix’s finger’s just above his hipbone, following its line, when he abruptly stops, almost drawing away and it takes him a second to realize through the daze that he’s waiting for him to open his eyes and look at him. The thought hits him like a physical shove, the air leaving his lungs in a ragged gasp. When he finally opens his eyes Nix’s staring at him, outwardly still absolutely calm, but his gaze is burning, eyes dark and pupils blown, and his fingers have started shaking slightly on Dick’ skin. He lets them drop as he moves closer and slowly starts to lean in, his breath grazing Dick’s lips. For the briefest moment Dick’s sure he’s actually going to kiss him and his eyes flutter shut again on instinct, his lips parting, but then he feels Nix’s breath graze his jaw and the briefest graze of his mouth against his cheek before he draws back completely.

By the time Dick catches himself enough to open his eyes, he’s sliding into the current a few meters away, grinning at him as though nothing happened.

****

A shell comes down two or three streets to the right, a direct hit to a building near the square.

It’s close enough that Dick can hear screams and someone calling for a medic.

He saw the name of the town on a sign on the way in, but he can’t remember it now and it’s all starting to blend together anyway at this point. The same half-destroyed houses with faded letters above the shop-windows, upturned cars, dry plants on the windowsills, a medieval church and Nazi-flags on the street-corners. It’s so similar to the battle he got wounded in a week ago, down to the commands and troop-movements that it seems like an unsettling case of déjà-vu and the past few days like a very vivid fever-dream.

“From the latest information we have they’re behind the old major’s house near the church. We’ll have to move around them and close them in, then get through to our men.”

Beside two trucks parked at a corner, he can see Nix helping another medic unload supplies.

The shout for a medic comes again, more urgent now.

“First and Second are going to move in from the left where the enemy concentration appears to be highest, Fifth from the right just behind that bakery along the side streets to the back of the Major’s house. Attack starts at 1120, meet up at the Major’s house at 1200 at the latest.”

Nix looks up just before he turns away to follow the other medic just like Dick though he would and although it’s barely a moment it hits him more than he thought it would, lungs too tight to breathe for several seconds after.

“Captain, since it’s your company you’ll be joining fifth. Captain Jackson’s going to need all the experience he can get.”

Dick focuses back on the Major standing next to him, a map of the town and its immediate surroundings laid out on the back of the truck in front of them. He’s got the same blonde, almost white hair the little girl had, matching, light grey eyes and a jagged scar from a shrapnel-hit across his cheek that’s just starting to heal fully and is standing out starkly against his pale skin. His helmet is lying beside the map in a gesture of calculated disregard for any risks that’s either reckless or a brilliant, subtle nudge for morale. You never know, until the mortar or bullet actually strikes and you have the benefit of hindsight.

“Yes, sir.”, he says, immediate and mechanic. It feels like those two words have made up most of his conversations since he got here, both his own and those around him. At this point it probably wouldn’t even really matter what comes before it because nobody’s really listening anymore. “Did you hear John broke up with his girl last week?” - “Yes, sir”. “I heard they’re so desperate they’re stealing the bread from the Germans.” – “Yes, sir.” “Did you know that replacement?” – “Yes, sir.” “We’re all going to die tomorrow.” – “Yes, sir.”.

“Good.”

The Major folds his map, apparently satisfied.

“Move out.”

As soon as he’s gone, Jackson – a few years older than Dick, black hair, tall and lanky with disproportionately large hands – steps into his place beside Nix, everything about him so obviously eager and expectant that it’s already tiring Dick out. He must be one of the newer ones.

“Sir, third is going to give us some covering fire and fourth will be supporting us from the right, they’re all already in position.”

“What about amo?”

“Low and impossible to get right now, but it should work.”

“The men are ready?”

“Yes, sir.”

Those words for everything again.

Another shell hits, closer this time, a few buildings down the street. The main artillery fire seems to be further towards the centre of town, though, exactly where they’re supposed to be heading. He hears distinct shouts and the sound of feet running on the battered street somewhere nearby. The soldiers are waiting for them on the corner of the road below a street-sign with half the inscription illegible from years of snow, wind and heavy rain. One of its edges is burned off, probably from the more recent and much faster effects of gunfire.

Instead of “ _Marché Remais_ ” it now reads _March R_ e.

“Alright listen up.”, Jackson says once they’re close enough, “We’re going to be moving in from the right at 1130 through those side streets, so be careful about snipers and keep close to the buildings where you can. Walk carefully.”

His voice sounds completely different now than it did a few moments ago while he was talking to Dick, stronger and with surprising authority. The kind of tone that directly connects to some primal part of the brain that once told you when was smarter to bow before stronger animal rivals and makes you instinctively want to straighten your back and salute.

“Lennart, Smith, Williams Rodriguez and Barnes you’re with me in front, the rest follow Captain Winters. Any questions?”

“No, sir.”, one answers and the other quickly echo him.

The same, perfectly polished rifles, the same fear in their eyes he saw a week ago.

When Jackson motions for his group to follow, they quickly pick up their gear and fall into line, the rest closing up behind Dick as they start to move towards into the first street. Dick’s eyes keep going up towards the windows, some of them destroyed in one of the previous blasts, most of those that are still more or less functional locked and with their curtains drawn.

He catches glimpses of old-fashioned white lace, painted Chinese porcelain figures, withered flowers, coloured candles, a proudly displayed Nazi flag and a French one three windows down. In one of them a black cat with a slash of white across her chest and a white spot on her forehead stares back at him as though she’s personally offended at their intrusion.

If there are any snipers in this street, they’re going to be completely exposed. They’d just have to pick them off one by one.

Then, only a few meters before them, a grenade explodes in the middle of the path.

Dick hears it hit the concrete a few seconds before it goes off. Two boys from the rear of Jackson’s group are thrown hard against the opposite wall and stay there, scaringly quiet and perfectly motionless, their heads slumped forward at unnatural angles. The second has landed half on top of the first and from a little further away it looks disturbing, almost peaceful, like he’d fallen asleep on the other one’s shoulder for a quick nap between actions.

The blast throws Dick backwards, sliding across the dirt and into one of the street-lanterns at the side of the street. His hipbone collides with the metal hard and almost detachedly hears the low scream of frustration he lets out, dragging himself up on the lantern until he’s sitting properly, but he refuses to swear. They’re already controlling everything else, he refuses to let them control that. It seems incredibly important somehow, far more important than not dying.

It’s never been dying here that’s been the hard part here.

“Sir, are you okay?”

The faces of the two soldiers who’d been right behind him swim into view, one of them crouched in front of Dick. He’s got a sharp chin and equally sharp, green eyes, his arm resting awkwardly across his knee.

“Sir?”, he repeats in that exaggeratedly clear, cautious way most adults use with children. “Everything all right?”

Dick pushes himself up further, using his hand to steady himself against the street lamp. His legs still feel a little shaky and it’s only then that he realizes that the side of the left leg of his trousers has a deep rip right from the middle of his shin all the way to the seam. Shrapnel. He can see no blood yet and he can put weight on it, at least standing, so it’s enough for him to work with for now.

“I’m fine.”, he says. His voice sounds ragged, like he’s inhaled smoke. “Keep moving, go.”, he adds when they don’t react and keep hovering.

“Sir-”

“ _Keep moving_.”

The sudden increase in volume roughens his voice up further, too fast, and he’s cut off by a cough, but it has the desired effect. The primal brain part kicks into action and the boys scramble to their feet, nodding and “Yes, sir”-ing, clipped and formal this time.

Four seconds later, the next impact comers, a mortar this time, a few meters further to the right, which means they know exactly where they are now. One might have been a coincidence, more are most likely not. Even without snipers, they’re sitting ducks now. They need to get out and they need to do it fast. Jackson’s group has stopped in front, two boys pressed against the wall with their guns aimed at a building opposite and returning the fire that’s started coming from there. Jackson’s behind them, watching, one foot up on the doorstep of the house at his side.

“We can’t stay here.”, Dick tells him as he comes up beside him, ducking beneath hanging geranium pots. “You need to keep them going, at least until the square. We have absolutely no cover here while the Germans have plenty, we won’t even see where they are.”

“But-”

“Get them to move, Jackson.”

Dick actually has no authority to tell him what to do considering it’s not his platoon, or even his battalion, he’s just betting on Jackson’s instincts from training to kick in and they do, like they do every single time. He looks back at Dick for a moment, opening and closing his mouth a few times and then he finally says -

“Yes, sir.”

He turns to the boys in front of him.

“Garcia, O’Brian get the others to move.”, he shouts, “Now.”

It’s a clean, precise shot through the helmet, right above his ear a moment after he’s done speaking. A sniper from one of the windows above, somewhere to their left. The boys jerk back as though it’s contagious and only one of them has the presence of mind to aim towards the building the shoot most likely came from and fire a few rounds in the hopes of getting whoever it was. The eyes of the rest are fixed on the body, mouths parted, weapons lax in their hands. When Dick looks again, Jackson’s face transforms briefly into Nix’s before it fades back into his own.

“You heard him”, he shouts over the noise of more artillery fire, “move out, keep going until you’re on the main road.”

Their gazes are completely dazed when they finally look up like they’re not quite sure who Dick is or how they got here, and he has to physically grab their shoulders and shake them to get them to move.

“The end of the street, _move_.”

He waits until the last one is scrambling up and running behind the rest of the group before he follows them, looking up at the window one last time. A bullet zings past near the boy in front of him, close enough to the helmet for it to be audible with a sharp, metallic sound, another one in front is shooting at a German crouched behind a barricade further down the road.

The German shots back and the boy almost stumbles into Dick when the bullet hits his arm, Dick curling his fingers around his upper arm to keep him upright.

“Thank you, Sir.”, he mumbles, almost casually, as if Dick had done nothing more than helped him out of the gutter somewhere in a New York backstreet.

He doesn’t move, though, and eyes are still too wide, hands shaking.

“Keep going. Watch the artillery.”

It was madness, sending them into this with the barest information.

Suddenly one the Germans behind collapses and in the brief pause it takes the other to reach down to reload, the boy to Dick’s right manages to hit him close to his right shoulder, then another lower on his chest. The blood is vivid red against the green of his uniform, the helmet dropping to the street and skipping a few times until it comes to rest against an upturned, charred bike. A shell hits the building opposite the barricade soon after, plaster raining down as they stop and press against the wall again, coughing. Dick can hear shouts from a side street, German. Another grenade, two streets down, then near the main street. He raises his hand to signal them to follow him, close to the walls. The sun has come out of the clouds briefly and the street is lit with late-afternoon sunshine, making it difficult to see in that direction for a few moments. Three German soldiers emerge from a side street in a run and Dick raises his gun to his chin, pointing.

“Wait”, he whispers, “wait until they’re close.”

Strangely, they don’t react at all or even look towards them for more than a brief, general sweep across the area and it Dick realizes that the sun must be affecting them, too.

Their corner is in complete shadow for as long as it’s out.

The Germans finally see them when they’re almost directly opposite them and it’s then that Dick gives the command to fire. Two are hit instantly, the third manages to give of three shots before he collapses as well, arching his back as he presses his hand to his leg. The water in the poodle next to it rapidly turns red, glistening in the sunrays. Dick hears shouts from the other end of the street, English this time. Ahead of them, the street is widening slightly and turning lazily to the left by a little cheese shop in a red, half-timbered house. Another, narrower road is continuing straight ahead with a second, barbed-wire barricade placed across the entrance between two buildings it but there’s no one behind it and no movement in the street either.

He motions for the boys behind him to follow him and leads them quickly to the one on the left, gesturing for them to continue to stay low. One of them nods before he seems to remember that no answer is required, the boy behind him passes the message on to those further behind. Dick hears their breaths and the light, careful thud of their footsteps behind him, product of hours of running down fields and up mountains. Motor noises come from a side-street to their right and all of them turn for a few seconds, instinctively, until the boy furthest in the back cries out and lands on his back in the mud. It’s a warning shot, in the lower leg. Enough to take him out, not enough to kill him.

His friend, closest to him, aims for the townhouse two buildings down and shots a round in quick succession and the sniper shots back immediately and with full, deadly accuracy. A in the stomach, the second right above the heart. Dick jogs back towards them and pushes the soldiers he passes on the way forward, towards the entrance of the street, shoving at an arm, a shoulder, the small of a back, whatever is closest and has the quickest effect. The guy with the sharp chin has kneeled down beside the two, pressing his hands to the wound.

“It’s alright. We’re going to get you out of here.”, he’s whispering when Dick crouches down beside him, “It’s alright.” His voice is hoarse, close to breaking.

Dick wonders just how long they knew each other. Probably like his Company, two years, three. And even that time is relative, feels longer once you’re going out to die. Maybe it has to.

“Private, get to your feet”, he says pointedly, “Follow the others.”

The boy blinks up at him, the corner of his mouth trembling like he’s going to cry any moment.

“I can’t leave them, Sir.”

“You won’t.”

He looks at Dick questioningly, brows furrowing and not moving from his spot.

“Sir?”

“I’ll stay with him. Get up and move.”

“You –”

“That’s an order, private.”

Slowly, hesitantly, the boy removes his hand and wipes it on his trousers before he shakily rises to his knees.

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell them to wait at the end of the street.”

“Yes, sir.”, then, when his back is already half-turned, “Thank you, sir.”

Dick watches him run to catch up with the group, and when he turns back Nix is on his knees beside him, gently shoving his hand away from the boy’s shin. He’s not looking at Dick, reaching down to a trousers pocket pull out a knife.

“What are you doing here?”

It’s a stupid question, but his mind is blank beyond the fact that Nix made his way down a street full of German soldiers and snipers on his own. He’s wearing the medical red cross, but it’s not a guarantee and it’s proven easy to ignore more than a few times on both sides.

Nix cuts up the trousers, a long, clean rip down the side. The boy’s skin beneath is completely shredded, a mess of blood and flesh and fragments of bone. Dick presses his hand to his mouth and has to fight back the impulse to retch.

“Press here.”, Nix says, grabbing Dick’s hand and guiding it to the side of the wound, palm down. The blood is warm beneath his hand, bubbling up and dripping past it. Nix looks in his bag for something and curses, then puts a piece of rolled-up bandage on top of the wound, fixing it tightly with a second one.

“Alright, you can let go now.”, he says, eyes flickering up to Dick, “They need you, I’ll be fine here. The cars are coming.”  
Dick nods while he reaches for the gun beside him.

The guy has opened his eyes, groaning, and Nix starts talking to him, a steady, comforting buzz of words to distract him as Dick starts to move away towards the street. His men are at the very end, behind the low wall of a vegetable garden. Dick squeezes in between the two at the front, their guns placed on top of the stones aimed at the buildings opposite them.

He gets a brief glimpse of the sharp-chinned boy, slumped against the wall of the building on their left.

“What’s the status?”

“Fifteen, probably twenty. Then more in the buildings and two in the windows of that blue house.”

The view’s partly obstructed by an old truck parked on the right, but it’s pretty clear that they’re close. Above the truck, the church is rising against the sky, dark-grey, ragged stone blackened in some places and there’s the sound of heavy fire, occasionally interrupted by screams or curses. There are a few make-shift barricades of boxes and wire in the middle of the street, the men Dick hasn’t seen since the last action positioned either behind them or further back. Loading, firing, Lipton on the right shouting orders. Speirs is crouched behind the right barricade, aiming one of the Germans in the windows. The Germans are closer to the houses behind their own barricades and trucks.

He draws back his sleeve and checks the clock. 1146. 

“Wait for it.”

More German cries come from the side and Dick doesn’t have to understand the language there either to hear the urgency in them. Soon after, the rumble of motors that’d followed them comes closer and there’s a barrage of artillery fire of an intensity that makes even the most eager take a few steps back before they catch themselves. The noise is deafening, vibrating through bones and skin. On the left, he sees two platoons from second moving into the street and he turns back and signals the boys to gather behind him.

As soon as they leave the cover of the street they sweep to the right and past behind the Germans who’re still distracted with the armoured cars that have suddenly appeared behind them and the fire from Easy in the front. By the time they turn back towards them, at least ten are already dead, slumped awkwardly over their wires.

“You’re late.”, first’s platoon leader says when Dick joins him next to the vehicles at the front.

“Well, you led us through a maze of streets full of German snipers and artillery.”, he says, not bothering to soften the blow, “You’re kind of lucky anyone arrived at all.”

****

“I’m not going to hug you in front of the children, but I’m definitely going to buy you that drink at the next marginally civilised place we get to.”

Harry’s half-leaning against him, one arm slung over Dick’s shoulder and limping slightly where a bullet has hit his shin. A private who’s walking beside them with his gun on his shoulder grins a little too delightedly and Dick turns back to Harry and raises a pointed eyebrow at him.

“The children?”

Harry just rolls his eyes. 

“I’m just going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“I also don’t drink and you know that.”

“Honestly Dick just…for once, don’t argue. Let me have this.”

A few of the soldiers are sitting with their back against a tree, heads leaned back and weapons on the ground in front of them, letting the sun shine on their faces. Their faces and uniforms are covered in dirt, dried and fresh blood and soot, one is missing an entire patch below the shoulder and the boots are caked up to ankle-deep in the ever-present mud that somehow never seems to quite dry on the streets. Green meadows with a few broken-down fences stretch behind them, the church tower just visible in the background.

One group is standing a little on the side, talking and they immediately turn around when they see them coming towards them.

“Sir.”

Lipton’s smiling as he salutes, the rest of the boys around him with the same, barely supressed grins and twinkling eyes. As nice as it is, it’s also a little disconcerting. Even Liebgott at Lipton’s side salutes happily as soon as Dick’s in front of him.

“We’re really glad have you back, Sir. We had no idea what happened and we thought you –”

The armoured vehicles and a tank are slowly rumbling in from the town on the main road next to them, the soldiers perched on top of them weaving proudly and yelling down that walking is for suckers. When they belatedly see Dick, they apologize profusely, “I’m so sorry, Sir, we didn’t mean it like that, Sir.”, and Dick has to bite his lip to keep from laughing. 

Some of the boys from Fifth are trailing behind them and a few of them also salute Dick as they walk past or just give him one of those silent, grateful looks he never really thought he’d be on the receiving end on. Of course he’d everything he could to keep them from dying, to make sure they were well-fed and rested as far as that was possible, but it’d never felt like something he deserved to be thanked for. It’d felt too selfish for that. He thinks of the feeling in the hospital, the bone-deep tiredness, helplessness and tenderness of a young mother with her screaming, newborn baby and realizes that it’s the same thing he felt with them most of the time. Maybe it’s why a mother doesn’t ask for a thank you, either.

“Yeah well, not this time.”, he says once they’re all gone, turning back to Lipton.

One of the vehicle starts behind them, slowly backing into a side street.

Beside it, two medics move past with a stretcher, the boy’s arm dangling over the edge.

“Yeah.”, Lipton repeats, “not this time.”

He clears his throat and looks away because he feels out of control, suddenly, in a way he hasn’t in a long time like there’s only one, random word missing to send him spinning or crying or shouting. 

“Alright, come on let’s not push our luck and get out of here.”

****

He finds Nix sitting on the pilot’s side of a burned-out bomber plane wreck on the edge of the town, feet propped up on the dash and blowing cigarette smoke into the night air. Its right wing, the door and part of the fuselage are missing, the other wing is charred along its whole length and Dick can only just make out the British flag and a few faded, white letters painted on the side.

Mercifully, there’s no sign of whoever had been flying it.

Nix gives Dick a smile when he sees him climb up the ladder, but it doesn’t quite catch.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

It’s gotten completely dark at some point during the past hour and a low breeze is grazing the fields and the town behind, leaving goose-bumps along Dick’s skin and carrying the thick smell of pines and late-afternoon rain. He’s loved that smell since he was a child, the wild promise of freedom in it.

“Looks like I’m not the only one.”

“Yeah.”

Nix doesn’t elaborate further. He’s right, there’s no need to, really.

Dick leans against the side of the plane, one foot placed on the floor between Nix’s.

The moon’s bright above them, dancing on Nix’s features as he takes another drag and blows the smoke into the night air. After a few more moments he shifts and swings his legs down, turning to face Dick properly until Dick’s almost standing between them.

He’s got a three-day’s growth of dark stubble and it softens his face a little and makes the curve of his mouth stand out even more starkly.

“Actually, I’m glad you’re here, I –”

He reaches up to neck, unhooking a necklace there and the light catches on it for a moment before he leans forward to put it around Dick’s, closing the clasp there again. It’s a very tasteful, simple silver cross, carved on the back with two initials so fine they’re barely visible.

Nix’s hand lingers over where it comes to rest on Dick’s his chest for a moment, tracing it’s shape, then he lets it fall again.

“It’s my grandmothers.”, he explains as he pulls back slightly, “She gave it to my uncle when he enlisted for the Great War and he brought it back and when I told her I was leaving she passed it on to me. You don’t have to wear it, obviously, I shouldn’t have - it was I didn’t even think that far to be honest and it was probably a stupid idea anyway I just – ”  
He half-expects Nix to turn his face away again at the last moment, but he stays completely still, just sucks in a surprised, little breath as Dick quiets him a press of his lips, barely enough to be able to imagine how it would feel. In the end it’s Nix who snaps and surges forward with a desperation that leaves Dick breathless for a few moments, mouth opening beneath his and hands dragging up his thighs to urge him up and to the side until Dick’s perched in his lap, knees braced on either side of him on the seat. His fingers are bunching up Dick’s shirt, dragging up over his waist to his ribs beneath it and Dick pulls back enough to throw off his, then starts to work on the buttons of the shirt while Nix watches, lips parted and eyes dazed.

He lets his hands trail over the skin of Dick’s chest that’s exposed, slowly as though he’s afraid that Dick’s going to shove his hands away at any moment, and when he’s done with the last one he moves them up to shove it off his shoulders.

When Dick leans forward again, lips grazing the corner of his mouth for a moment, Nix helps him as fumbles with the buttons on his with shaking hands, splaying his fingers over Nix’s chest as he pushes the material back and works his way further down. He can feel Nix’s breathing picking up, the way his stomach rises and falls with it against his hands and his hips jerk up helplessly beneath Dick’s, thighs pressing against the inside of Dick’s. It feels like it should be accompanied by something more momentous, an autumn storm in the middle of the night, rain, flash and thunder, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on full volume, like this alone should be able to win wars and defeat armies. 

The shirt lands somewhere on the floor next to him with a distant, dull thud, Nix’s hands restlessly running up and down the back of his thighs as Dick starts to move against him, pressing his hips down with one hand braced on the backside of the seat beside Nix’s head.

By the time Dick’s breathing too hard to keep up the kiss, dragging his mouth away to Nix’s cheek to breathe, Nix’s shaking, fingers loosening where they’ve fallen to Dick’s hips. His breaths are coming so fast that he sounds like he’s hyperventilating, verging on chocked, little sobs.

“I thought you didn’t want to know.”

It’s not really convincing with how he’s started shaking, too, hands braced on the seat beside Nix’s head. He gasps when Nix’s hand grazes his crotch through his trousers as his fingers fiddle with his flies. When it slips inside he moans gently, letting his eyes fall closed again.

“I don’t care.”, Nix breathes against his jaw, lips catching against Dick’s briefly as he tries to chase his mouth blindly, “Kiss me again.”

****

“You know you could have told me you were hiding all that.”

Nix’s chest is still heaving a little, leaning back against the seat with Dick’s feet stretched out on his lap, finger tracing the bone of Dick’s ankle.

“They’re right, it’s always the quiet ones.”

A lone bird is crying in a tree somewhere nearby and the breeze has picked up a little, trailing gently over their cooling skin, the kind of warm, humid summer night to sits outside with a drink and talk until the early morning hours.

On one of them, when he was seven or eight years old, tucked onto a blanket in the corner of their garden with condensation gathering on the side of their glasses in the grass beside them, his mother had read Shakespeare’s _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ to him. It’s that what he sees now in the soft sweep of the trees behind Nix’s shoulders, lingering smell of wild flowers and the fragmented light of the moon catching on fields of grain in the distance and - the magic of his mother’s voice, faeries, people with animal’s heads and secret potions.

“Yeah well. I didn’t know either.”, he says, eyes flicking back towards Nix.

He watches it sink it, the little pause in his movement and twitch of Nix’s lips as he leans down to look for a cigarette in the pocket of his jacket. He straightens again and lights it, blowing the smoke out into the night. He’d always thought it was a cliché, in that situation, but right now Dick thinks he’s beginning to see the appeal.

“I wish you’d had more than this, then.”, Nix says with the kind of longing behind it that makes Dick wonder whether he’s talking about more than just the sex. It’s the closest most ever come to talking about anything connected to “after” and, even this vague, those dreams are the most precious currency anyone can offer here.

He tries to imagine Nix out of the uniform, jeans and white shirt and sunglasses, a beer beside him on a wall by the sea, but the image swims into indistinct colours again before it can settle, leaving a lingering smell of restaurant air and a late night’s wind between buildings. In a way, that’s the whole point of the uniform, though, he supposes. Not to think about what could have been or will be.

Not to think in terms of yourself at all.

“I mean it’s not the worst, but it doesn’t compare to a proper bed.”

He doesn’t say anything, because, like before, there’s nothing relevant say.

They both know that back-and-forth of feeling like it is, or was, both your choice and not and the moments when it doesn’t matter either way. And they both know what it looks like when you definitely don’t have any choice at all.

“You know, I wasn’t completely sure if you’d remember my name.”, he says instead, only half-jokingly. Nix just looks at him for a few moments, hungrily enough for Dick’s pulse to pick up, then stubs out his cigarette and crawls over him until he’s pushed Dick back into the backseat, eyes sparkling with supressed laughter. He leans down and rubs his nose along Dick’s briefly, their lips brushing.

“You know, you might need to remind me again.”  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! if you want to come talk to me outside the comments I'm also on tumblr @ wordwhisper.tumblr.com/ask. (as i'm new i still barely know anyone from this fandom so yeah, definitely feel free to drop by).


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